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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A THEORY OF MOTIVES, IDEALS, AND 
VALUES IN EDUCATION 



A THEORY OF MOTIVES 

IDEALS AND VALUES 

IN EDUCATION 



BY 



WILLIAM ESTABROOK CHANCELLOR 

Superintendent of Public Instruction, District of Columbia ; Lecturer 

on History of Educational Theory, Johns Hopkins University; 

Lecturer on Education, George Washington University ; 

Author,'' Our Schools: Their Administration 

and Supervision ; " etc. 



" There is no darkness but ignorance." 

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 
Act IV, Sc. ii 




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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

mt HiitoErisilie ^rei^^, CambnD0e 

1907 



1 7;^ fi p, ((y of congress'' 

two Coole? Received 

CCT li'90'* 

Cmtyriffht Entry 

? CLASS /^ )lAC., No. 

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COPYB, 



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COPYRIGHT 1907 BY WILLIAM E. CHANCELLOR 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



PREFACE 

In this book I have undertaken that most difficult of all 
intellectual tasks, — to determine the values of the activ- 
ities and of the ideals of men. In this task, many men 
engage themselves more or less seriously ; poets, philo- 
sophers, statesmen, historians, men of affairs, gossips, 
cynics, idlers ; and all fail. Yet no critic is competent to 
measure the extent of their failures. If, however, the 
practical educator would lift his own work out of empir- 
icism and traditionalism into the freedom and reason- 
ableness of philosophy, he must undertake this task. 

The immediate influences upon me have been of two 
kinds : the practical experiences of a working superin- 
tendent and the academic associations of a university 
lecturer. The true substratum, the bedrock of the book 
is not science or art, but a faith that seems to me war- 
ranted by history as well as by philosophy and necessi- 
tated by the nature of the human mind, — that this life 
is, to use the frequent phrase of Carlyle, "but a little 
gleam between two eternities." I am well aware of the 
place of this opinion in the history of philosophy. But 
only such an opinion, true or false, it seems to me, can 
justify true seriousness of thought or of conduct in life. 
It warrants the saying of Emerson, " I am to see to it 
that the world is better for me, and to find my reward 
in the act," — my reward being the irreversible educa- 
tion of an eternal soul.^ I cannot accept the opinion of 
Matthew Arnold, 

" Hath man no second life ,'' 
Pitch this one high ; " 2 

for the conclusion seems a non seqtiitiir from the pre- 
mise, and the premise itself false. I hold life one. 

Obviously in every progressive age there must be a 

1 Man, the Reformer. 2 Poents^ ** Anti-Desperation." 



vi PREFACE 

" new education," for the progress of humanity is con- 
ditioned by the better development of the new generation. 
A static education is both cause and effect of a static 
civiUzation. I use these terms very loosely, for it may 
fairly be questioned whether education is not in its very 
nature dynamic, and whether a civilization must not al- 
ways be either progressive or decadent ; but as thus used 
the terms deliver my meaning. Nothing can be more 
false than the notion that a civilization may advance 
while its educational phase remains in statu quo. Yet 
this false notion is the very substance of most of the 
opposition, whether popular or professional, to "the new 
education." 

It becomes, therefore, a part of my obligation to dis- 
cuss civilization, success, education, and progress, for 
until the terms are defined, neither agreement nor con- 
clusion, neither satisfaction nor enlightenment is possi- 
ble. I must, of course, take for granted certain matters, 
for education is not a basic science, but rather one that 
utilizes as its own postulates the conclusions of other 
sciences. Indeed, by some, the proposition that educa- 
tion is a science is challenged. In this book, I do not 
discuss these postulates, though I state and, in some 
instances, illustrate them. 

The philosophy of education is not quite synonymous 
with the science of teaching, and the profession of edu- 
cation is not at all coterminous with the art. Teaching 
is artistic ; education architectural, architectonic. From 
want of this distinction, there have been confusion and 
conflict. This distinction I draw, following it with various 
conclusions and applications that appear pertinent to the 
needs and conditions of this American democracy. 

The references will, I trust, sufficiently display my 
obligations to those who have gone before me. Many 
principles and notions here repeated seem to be too much 
the general property of mankind to justify mention of 



PREFACE vii 

their last or most elaborate account ; and some have come 
to me in periodicals or in conversation in such fashion 
that I am unable to identify their sources. As far as 
possible, I have avoided topics treated by myself in other 
books ; but where an argument has seemed essential to 
my theory, I have not hesitated to repeat at least the 
outline. 

From what I know of educational theory and practice, 
it seems that this book has five features of significance : 

1. The assertion of the universal rather than the 
mediate place and value of education, as an integral social 
institution. 

2. The presentation in a hierarchical form of the 
evidences of education as its successively higher ideals. 

3. The discovery of the true relations of motives, 
values, and ideals by arranging these terms logically. 

4. The emphasis of the philosophic spirit underlying 
and establishing the modern course of study and mode 
of administration. 

5. The development of a system based upon the pro- 
position of the necessity of the complete education of 
each and of all. 

I have sought not to substantiate, but to demonstrate 
these principles and their corollaries. I believe not that 
these should be the principles of education, but that they 
are the principles, for I look upon education as a science 
whose truths are certain to be discovered by observation, 
experimentation, and verification. Of course, if these 
simple principles are the real truth, then we can construct 
scientifically and easily the appropriate machinery of 
educational practice, redeem the schools from their pre- 
sent overloading, confusion, and routinism, and restore 
education to its purpose, which is to educate men and 
women. True education is indifferent as to what particu- 
lar things its graduates know, but sensitive in every 
fibre to what they are and can do. 



CONTENTS 

PART ONE. EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 
CHAPTER I 

THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 

Educational theory must precede educational practice — The 
duality of man — The individual paramount to the race — 
Development of the soul -The leisure class - Society and 
solitude — Recapitulation theory— Order, the manner of edu- 
cation ^ 

CHAPTER II 

VALUES OF THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 

Property - The Family — The Church — The State — The School 
— Culture— Business— War 3^ 

CHAPTER III 

CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 

Mechanical processes of civiUzation — Its quality depends upon 
its morality — Morals : social, popular, historical, national, com- 
parative, ideal — Morals and ethics — Educability unaffected 
by physique, race, sex, or time — Growth of the race in know- 
ledge — Individual and race culture — Good and bad education 52 

CHAPTER IV 

PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE 

Success not always a matter of the entire life or of general accom- 
plishment—Personal weaknesses often forgiven to the great 
— Success not always recognized at the time — Our failures in 
matters of property, religion, domestic life, government — Tests 
of success and failure 7° 



X CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V 

EDUCATION IN RELATION TO PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALITY AND 
TO SOCIAL AND PERSONAL PROGRESS 

Source and growth of new truth — Assimilation of ideas — Hu- 
man and social characteristics — Dependence of civilization 
upon education — Fundamental laws of population — Duty of 
education toward the classes and the masses 82 

CHAPTER VI 

THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION 

Social motives in organizing education — Social causes for the 
failure of education — Education toward ends unwarranted — 
Personal causes for the failure of education 97 

PART TWO. THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 
CHAPTER VII 

THE PRESENT SUBORDINATION AND DEPENDENCE OF THE SCHOOL 

The school of education and of training — Subordination and 
morality — Dependence upon Property — Upon the Family — 
Upon the Church — Upon Culture — Upon the State . . . . 115 

CHAPTER VIII 

THE NEW^ EDUCATION 

Mechanism of education — Bases of education as a science — Psy- 
chology — Criminology — Political Economy — The progressive 
stages of education 138 

CHAPTER IX 

THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 

Parents should compose most of the educational profession — Pe- 
riod of compulsory education — Varied materials of education 
— Individual needs 164 

CHAPTER X 

LEGISLATION, ADMINISTRATION, SUPERVISION, AND INSTRUCTION AS 
EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 

Legislation by constitutional conventions — Legislatures and 
Boards of Education — State interference with private schools 



CONTENTS XI 

— State centralization and local autonomy — National control 

— Purpose of supervision — Characteristics of poor instruction i8o 

PART THREE. THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 
CHAPTER XI 

INTELLIGENCE 

The senses — Processes of observation — Literacy — Language — 
Literacy and efficiency — Literacy and moraUty — Phonics — 
Polyglottism — Grammar — Definition 203 

CHAPTER XII 

EFFICIENCY 

Activity beyond knowledge — Health and efficiency — Efficiency 
and property — Economic inactivity in the home — Efficiency 
and the Church — Efficiency and government — Efficiency and 
the arts — Efficiency in education — Economic efficiency — Ef- 
ficiency and war 243 

CHAPTER XIII 

MORALITY 

Physical laws of morality — Moral laws of Property — Of the-Fam- 
ily — Of the Church — Of the State — Of the School — Of Cul- 
ture — Of Occupation — Of Business — Of general Society . 274 

PART FOUR. THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 
CHAPTER XIV 

SCIENCE 

The scientific method — Superstitions — The search for truth in 
Nature — God in Nature — Science and Philosophy .... 317 

CHAPTER XV 

ART 

Multiplicity of the arts — Tyranny of art — Artists and artisans 

— Art and education — Democracy of art — The technique of 

art 328 



xii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XVI 

PHILOSOPHY 

Individual philosophy — Historical philosophy — Differentiation 
of other sciences from philosophy — Dangers of philosophy to 
the inexperienced — Functionings of knowledge — Instinct . . 341 

CHAPTER XVII 

HEALTH AND HOLINESS 

Efforts of Nature in behalf of health — Civilization inimical to 
health — Heredity, environment, and health — Health and occu- 
pation — Age and holiness 359 



PART FIVE. MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCA- 
TIONAL PRACTICE 

CHAPTER XVIII 

HABIT, CHANGE, AND ILLUSIONS OF CHANGE 

Habits of individuals — Habits of communities — Habits of social 
institutions — Conservatism of the School 373 

CHAPTER XIX 

MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 

Subjects tending to train the powers of observation — Training in 
efficiency — Training in morality — Language — Mathematics 
— History — Science — Art — The art of health . , . . . 383 

CHAPTER XX 

CONSTANTS, ELECTIVES, PROGRAMMES AND COURSES 

Play — Nature-study — Language — Music — Drawing — Arithme- 
tic — History — Electives — Order of studies — Arrangement 
of a curriculum 423 

CHAPTER XXI 

RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS OF SOCIETY AND EDUCATORS 

Responsibility of the teacher to the child — To the mother of the 
child — To the taxpayer — To the State — Increased expendi- 
tures for the School a necessity 433 



CONTENTS xiii 

CHAPTER XXII 

THE NATURAL MAN 

Primary and secondary motives of life — City life — Resistance of 
humanity to culture — Motives, ideals, and principles of the bar- 
barian — The warfare of civilization 442 

CHAPTER XXIII 

THE WELL-EDUCATED MAN 

The qualities of the well-educated man — His acquirement of cul- 
ture 464 

CHAPTER XXIV 

THE LINE OF MARCH 

Method of growth in civilization — True civilization a progress 
away from Nature — Evidences of a true civilization . , . . 475 

CHAPTER XXV 

THE MEANING OF LIFE 

Common attitude toward death — The necessity of evil — Contin- 
uousness of the School — Education as an independent social 
institution 486 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 499 

INDEX 519 



PART ONE 
EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

The difficulties of democracy are the opportunities of educa- 
tion. — Butler, The Meaning of Education^ p. 120. 



A THEORY OF 

MOTIVES, IDEALS, AND VALUES 

IN EDUCATION 

CHAPTER I 

THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 

Where no vision is,'the people is made naked. — Proverbs xxix, i8 (alternative reading). 

And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. — John, Revelation xxii, 17. 

in the dialectic of personal growth, the development of self-consciousness proceeds by a 
two-fold relation of give-and-take between the individual and his social fellows. . . . Both 
ego and alter are thus essentially social ; each is a soctus, and each is an imitative crea- 
tion. — Baldwin, Mental Development: Social and Ethical I titer pretations, pp. 512, 
519. 

To educate is to lead forth, to guide forward. But 
what is to be led or guided } And from whence } In 
what direction is forward t Who should lead, and who 
be led } And when } By what means, and by what 
methods } These questions are to be answered by edu- 
cational theory before the answer may be demonstrated 
in educational practice. 

In the familiar illustration of the Cave,^ Plato represents 
men as " living in a kind of underground den that has an 
opening toward the light. Chained so that they cannot turn 
their heads, they see only their shadows, or the shadows of 
one another, which the fire above and behind them throws 
on the opposite wall of the cave." Occasionally, one is 
freed from his chains. At first, such an one does not know 
whether the shadows or the other men themselves are real. 
When this one goes out into the world, the sun, moon, stars, 
and earth astonish him ; and he wonders that he ever could 
1 Plato, The Republic, 515. 



4 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

have enjoyed the cave. Should he return thither, the cave- 
men will despise him because, with the loss of familiarity, he 
will have lost skill in the ways of the cave. But he himself 
will know that the outer world is the true world and will 
always desire to dwell there. Such is an interpretation of life 
that education may derive from philosophy. 

Education is applicable to whosoever is educable. To 
say that education is impossible in a particular instance 
is to say that the creature is not educable, is indocile, 
is incapable of growth. A good man would hesitate to 
affirm this of any conscious living thing. Of any hu- 
man being not educable, he speaks with sorrow, using 
with the utmost hesitation such terms as '* feeble- 
minded," "imbecile," "idiot," and "incorrigible," and 
trying to think and to act upon the theory that there is 
no absolute idiocy. A complete system of therapeutics 
has been built upon the theory that even the insane 
may be redeemable and educable. To say, as some do 
carelessly, that education is "finished," is to display 
ignorance or forgetfulness of the nature of education. 

It is the conscious creature alone that is educable. 
The stone may be cut and carved : this is not education. 
The tree may be transplanted, grafted, or bent : none 
of these operations is education. The oyster may be 
improved by proper planting and feeding ; but this im- 
provement is not education. Certain insects, however, 
may be educated. In many instances, birds, beasts, and 
fishes have been educated to considerable degrees of 
larger and more conscious thought and action. The 
higher, the stronger, the larger the conscious life of a 
creature, the greater is its educability. In the case of 
man, the educability of an individual seems to be quite 
as much a matter of the skill of the educator as of the 
quality of the pupil. The limit of the education of a 
man of talents seems usually to be rather in his oppor- 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 5 

tunities than in himself. The genius ^ is he whose edu- 
cation is self-originated and transcends the quality of 
his instruction. The larger, the more intense, the fuller, 
and the clearer the presentations in consciousness, and 
the vaster, the saner, and the more reliable the subcon- 
sciousness, the more nearly may perfect education be at- 
tained.^ It is true, of course, that the finite as such can 
never be perfectly educated. Individuality sets its own 
limitations. To know everything, to feel everything, to 
will everything ; to mirror the world ; to represent per- 
fection : these are beyond the goals of the finite creature. 
To run well the race of the mortal ; this is enough. God 
cannot ask the mortal to return more than He gives 
him ; but so much as He has given God may ask. And 
no man may say how much God has given. 

Of mortal man, there is the carnal, and there is the 
spiritual. The body is the temple of the soul.^ Spirit 
wars with flesh.'* The spirit indeed is willing, but the 
flesh is weak.^ In respect to this apparent duality of 
man, the purposes of education are to make the body 
a satisfactory, that is, healthy, obedient, and skillful, 
instrument of the spirit ; to give the spirit all possible 
freedom from the body, its functions, duties, needs, 
weaknesses, lusts, joys, and pains ;*^ to keep the body 
alive as long as the spirit may use it as a fair habitation ; 
and to release the spirit from the body undefiled by it 

^ Baldwin, Mental Development : Social and Ethical Interpretations^ 
chapter v. 

2 ]^sixo'^, Psychology of the Unconsciotts. 

2 I Corinthians vi, 19. A saying of Paul's. 

■* Galatians v, 17, A teaching of Paul's. 

^ Matthew xxvi, 41. A saying of Jesus'. 

^ " Let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the 
pleasures and ornaments of the body as foreign to him, and has fol- 
lowed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life, and who has adorned 
the soul in her own proper jewels, — temperance and justice and cour- 
age and nobility and truth." Plato (Socrates), Phcedo. 



6 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

and ready and eager for the opportunities of the life to 
come.* 

Evidently, then, the soul, which is spirit at once con- 
scious and self-conscious, is to be educated, and the body 
is to be trained. The final education of the soul is its 
release from the body.^ Mere physical growth brings the 
human being from infancy to maturity ; and the brain of 
the man appears to be a better instrument for his soul 
than was the brain of the child. ^ Such growth effects 
of itself a partial release of the soul from the body. 

For reasons inscrutable to man, it appears that the 
purpose of human life in respect to the spirit is to 
inform it by giving it knowledge. The spirit is incar- 
nated and thereby becomes soul. A soul, then, is spirit, 
living in the flesh and become conscious of its isolation 
from other spirit. Incidentally, the purpose of education 
is to inform the soul by giving it systematic experience. 
In this sense, education is the salvation or redemption 
of the soul, which is its restoration to pure spirit.^ 

^ " Deliberate and foresee the end : examine whether passion tend to 
that which will be approvable when it is past. The sinful passions are 
blind and are moved only by things present. They cannot endure the 
sight of the time to come." Coit, after Richard Baxter, Christian Ethic Sy 
p. 261. 

2 " He has outsoared the shadow of our night. 
Envy and calumny and hate and pain, 
And that unrest which men miscall delight, 
Can touch him not, and torture not again. 
From the contagion of the world's slow stain 

He is secure." 

Shelley, Adonais. 

3 The educator need not answer in terms the metaphysical questions 
whether the soul itself grows, whether the body is such an instrument 
as actually helps the growth of the soul, and whether the body condi- 
tions the soul. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, pp. 336-348. 

^ The theological and religious implications of this principle are 
obvious. No human culture has neglected to consider them. See Hall, 
Adolescence : its Psychology, chapter x, for the history of the soul. Arnett, 
"The Soul: Past and Present ^Q\\&is>'' Joiirtial of Psychology, K^x\\ 
July, 1904. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 7 

To say that it is the purpose of education to acquaint 
the individual with Nature and human society is to 
assign as a purpose what is philosophically but a means 
or at best a method ; or else to assign as a purpose of 
education what is really but a purpose of instruction. 
These propositions must be true, unless we conceive 
individual man as ephemeral and man the race or human 
society as paramount. Man, the physical race, is de- 
monstrably not eternal or immortal. It is inconceivable 
that sun, earth, mankind as such will last forever. But it 
is not inconceivable that the individual is immortal or 
eternal or that one may achieve immortality, which is not 
necessarily to suppose that, retaining personality, one may 
achieve infinity, universality, eternity. Shut in, there- 
fore, by the inexorable logic of the human status, to 
save for one's self the ideal of the worth of effort, one 
must regard the individual as of greater value than soci- 
ety or the race itself. This brings us to the conclusion 
that the purpose of education is not the welfare of 
humanity, but the progress of the individual.^ Fortu- 
nately for the cause of education, considered as a social 
institution, this apparently metaphysical conclusion is 
sustained by common sense, for a society composed 
wholly of fully educated individuals would be ideal, and a 
society blessed by the activities of though but a few 
nobly educated individuals is enlightened by a quality of 
genius transcending all the possibilities of any quantity 
of lesser talents. Entire ages and nations, all the world 
and all time, glow with the beauty of the truth seen and 



1 To achieve eternal life is an ideal not less broadening than that to 
achieve social efficiency. By as much as eternity transcends society, and 
immortality sociality, by so much does the individual transcend mankind. 
This raises without answering the question whether body and soul are 
not both, as products of this particular universe, and as conditions of 
one another, incapable of being related in thought to eternity and infinity 
as expressed in any other universe. 



8 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

taught by Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, 
Paul, Augustine, Dante, Kant, Emerson. 

" Great men are the fire pillars in this dark pilgrimage of 
mankind : they stand as everlasting witnesses of what has 
been, prophetic tokens of what still may be, the revealed, 
embodied possibilities of human nature." ^ 

The soul is to be developed out of the ignorance, 
the weakness, and the errors of childhood into full ma- 
turity, and sustained therein till freed from the body 
by death. Its development is outward, a revelation, 
a disclosure, an expression. But as the soul develops, 
it infolds knowledge, ideals, hopes, gathered out of the 
world. The larger the soul grows, the more it includes. 
Its sympathies and passions, its joys and griefs, its facts, 
laws, values, its truths, standards, principles, its motives, 
desires, purposes, increase, take on organization, resolve 
themselves with every new experience. The outer man 
grows larger, the inner man more full and perfect.^ He 
centres himself upon conscience, whose still, small voice 
is an echo, as it were, of the voice of God : he radiates 
into the universe of Nature, and there likewise finds 
God.^ 

But shall the child, the youth, the man, educate him- 
self ? The Maker of worlds has not so ordered this 
world and this humanity. The spirit is not to be left in 
its confusion alone in a strange body upon this new 
earth as a being lost, helpless, unbefriended. The soul 

1 Goethe, Schiller. 

2 " Century by century the educating process of the social life has been 
working at human nature ; it has built itself into our inmost soul. Con- 
science — the sense of right and wrong — springs out of the habit of 
judging things from the point of view of all and not of one." Clifford, 
Ethics of Religion, Essays, p. 383. 

3 " The voice of conscience is the voice of our Father Man who is 
within us ; the accumulated instinct of the race is poured into each one 
of us, and overflows us, as if the Ocean were poured into a cup." Clif- 
ford, Decline of Religious Belief p. 391. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 9 

finds itself surrounded by other and older souls, lest it 
die.^ The entire process before and after birth is a pro- 
vision for the circumstancing, supporting, sheltering, 
nurturing, and befriending of the soul. And never was 
this more true than at the present age in America, for 
all the institutions of society are wrought together to 
protect the new soul in its adventures in, this strange 
world. The womb, the mother, the home, the church, 
the school, all speak one truth. We prolong infancy for 
the one purpose of enriching the human being.^ What- 
ever works to the injury of the child from conception 
to maturity is contrary to the design of Nature and of 
human nature ; and appearances to the contrary not- 
withstanding, it is occasional and exceptional. It is an 
evil tending to destroy humanity ; and to this time, all 
evils, however many, however great, have been, though 
able to stay, yet unable to stop, the progress and the 
multiplication of mankind. 

In the environment of childhood and' youth, by far 
the most important feature is the society of persons. In 
this society of persons, two classes are of paramount 
importance, the parents and the teachers, both of whom 
work upon the child with intent and with greater or less 
deliberateness. The whole tradition of the race with 
respect to childhood is the necessity of developing it or 
of developing manhood or womanhood out of it.^ The 
tradition is against a natural maturity, that is, against a 
manhood or womanhood uninfluenced by the deliberate 
labors of older persons. The street gamin of the city, 
the boy hermit of the country, every isolated child, is 

1 " At birth, the child is tossed like a shipwrecked mariner upon a 
strange and unknown coast." Hall, Adolescence^ p. 5. 

2 Fiske, A Century of Science, chapter iv ; Butler, Meaning of Educa- 
tion, p-p. 6-iy ; Charlotte Oilman, Woman and Economics, passim; Ter- 
man, fournal of Psychology, 1905, April, "Precocity and Prematuration." 

3 Mathews, Proceedijigs Amer. P/iilos. Soc. ; Spencer-Gillan, Central 
Australian Tribes. 



10 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

believed to be on the way to making a criminal or a 
lunatic. Men humanize each new man. 

The parents are the natural and predestined educators 
of children, the teachers are their chosen and voluntary- 
educators. As civilization grows in difficulty and in com- 
plexity, the popular requirements of teachers grow con- 
stantly greater. This is due not only to the fact that 
the items and the mass of inherited culture constantly 
increase, — a heritage that imposes upon the individual 
an undeniable servitude, — but also to the fact that the 
powers of the individual must be developed more and 
more for his own preservation in civilization and for the 
preservation of that civilization itself. One cause of the 
failure y final and hitherto inevitable^ of every civilization 
has bee7i the inability of Nature to bring to birth, and of 
the civilization to develop, a siifficient number of persons 
competent for its tasks. The problem of education, con- 
ceived as a social institution, is to produce for "the work 
of the world" at least as much from its raw material as 
that work needs. This work of the world is not merely 
"the hewing of wood and the drawing of water." It is 
providing for humanity more than food and clothes, 
homes, shops, factories, and mines. A purely material 
civilization, however many its luxuries, almost because 
of its marvelous luxuries, would have no consistency ; 
could never be established ; if suddenly created, would 
not last a day. A hundred and twenty years ago France, 
and in our own times Russia, disintegrated in murderous 
revolution for want of generally diffused intellectual and 
moral culture. The poet is as much a necessity to a 
great civilization as is the business man or the legislator ; 
ay, and more of a necessity. 

" We are the music makers, 

And we are the dreamers of dreams, 
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 
And sitting by desolate streams ; 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION ii 

World-losers and world-forsakers, 

On whom the pale moon gleams : 
Yet we are the movers and shakers 

Of the world forever, it seems. 

*' With wonderful deathless ditties 
We build up the world's great cities, 
And out of a fabulous story 
We fashion an empire's glory : 
One man with a dream, at pleasure, 

Shall go forth and conquer a crown : 
And three with a new song's measure 
Can trample a kingdom down. 

" We, in the ages lying 

In the buried past of the earth. 
Built Nineveh with our sighing. 

And Babel itself in our mirth ; 
And o'erthrew them with prophesying 

To the old of the new world's worth ; 
For each age is a dream that is dying, 

Or one that is coming to birth." ^ 

Every civilization requires a certain amount of econo- 
mic burden to steady it ; a leisure class is as neces- 
sary as are the various industrial classes. ^ This leisure 
class, however, must be a working and not an idling 
class. Every leisure class is always perilously near its 
own destruction. The true leisure class is a reservoir, 
often a well-spring, of true culture. It makes scholarship 
possible. It protects ethics. It standardizes morals. It 
reflects, criticises, evaluates, appreciates, and encourages 
whatever is good in the world. It knows sympathy and 
has time and disposition to manifest the graces of social 
and personal life. It works, though indeed it may work 
upon things at present invisible. Many an economic par- 
asite is a moral or cultural paragon : many such a para- 
site has built for the economic life of future society. 

1 Arthur O'Shaughnessy. 

2 Vide Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, passim ; Mayo-Smith, 
Statistics and Economics, chapter xiii; Statistics and Sociology, p. 206. 



12 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

This is a hard doctrine, resented in many quarters, 
resented by nearly every economic worker who hears it 
and has time to think of it. Because of their resentment 
against those who may give their whole life to leisure, 
there is a defensive and reactionary disposition in cer- 
tain quarters to declare that economic laborers shall have 
no leisure at all. But this conclusion is distinctly a non 
sequitur. The familiar notion of such as Tolstoi, that in 
an ideal society all will work as producers of economic 
goods or as servants of such producers part of the time, 
and have leisure for the rest, is a merely mechanical view. 
This view ignores one of the great qualities of a civil- 
ized society, — its power to store up goods, scholarship, 
traditions, arts, culture, against the future. A civilized 
society does not live from hand to mouth, no, nor by a 
year at a time ; but it lives centuries beyond its econo- 
mic working period, as Rome and France lived. If a 
man may work mornings and enjoy economic leisure 
afternoons ; if he may work six days and rest the 
seventh ; if he may work winters and rest summers or 
work summers and rest winters ; if he may support his 
children in the economic idleness of school-going ; if he 
may, and indeed ought to, lay up a store ''against the 
rainy days " of invalidism, old age, accident, and illness ; 
if he can ever earn the right to travel for recreation and 
for intellectual and moral improvement ; if he has a right 
to the mere society of his fellow men in hours, days, and 
seasons when neither he nor they are bearing the bur- 
dens of active labor, — and all these things are part and 
parcel of civilization, — then of right the man is entitled 
to leisure. The other questions — how he is to be sup- 
ported in his leisure ; whether a child may or may not 
be rightfully or wisely given, by inheritance or by other 
social favor, a leisure that he (or she) has not earned ; 
whether the leisure class is or is not too large, too 
secure, too luxurious — do not concern us here as critics 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 13 

of education. We may well sympathize with the 
plaint, — 

" And these all, laboring for a lord, 
Eat not the fruit of their own hands, 
Which is the heaviest of all plagues 
To that man's mind who understands." ^ 

But we must recognize the fact that in every civilized 
society there must be some who eat bread in the sweat 
of other men's faces ; whose obligation is to return ten- 
fold to their souls. Education must prepare for the no- 
blest social services of leisure, deserved or justified, if 
not actually earned. 

But education finds its larger responsibility in bring- 
ing the economic workers, hitherto spoiled more or less 
wantonly of most of the benefits of civilization, to their 
highest possible state, redeeming them in their eco- 
nomic labor to become co-workers with all others in gov- 
ernment, in religion, and in every other social activity. 

When should education begin its work of perfecting 
the sons and daughters of men ? This question can be 
answered only by modern physiology and psychology. 
It is scarcely approvable that education by schooling 
should be begun before the child is seven years old ;• but 
occasional education by suggestions, play, story-telling, 
and unwatched voluntary manual exercises may be 
beneficial before that time. A real garden of children 
is greatly to be desired wherever children congregate ; 
but the formal kindergarten may be maintained at the 
price of passivity, anaemia, brain-lesions, dullness, arrest 
of development, and consequent failure of life and in 
life. And the formal common school also is too often 
responsible for similar wrongs.^ 

When should education cease its work of perfecting 
men and women ? Once more we must go to physiology 

1 Matthew Arnold, Sick Man of Bokhara. 

2 Harris, Psychological Foundations of Education, p. 142. 



14 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

and to psychology for our answers. While the brain 
and the nervous system are able properly to sustain con- 
tinuous, directed, exacting mental, manual, and other or- 
ganic effort before seven years of age, seldom are they 
able to sustain such effort after sixty years of age; 
and seldom do the character and mind of an individual 
display any improvement from direct educational effort 
after forty years of age. In the old, motives, ideals, 
judgments function so persistently that the traditions 
of society are conserved. Moreover, these older persons 
are able to devote most of their time and nearly all of 
their energy to industrial effort, thus bearing the world 
of humanity upon their shoulders.^ Youth generates 
ideas ; genius, persisting in youth, devises many inven- 
tions ; thereby youth and genius dower society with op- 
portunities of progress, while age, proving all things, holds 
fast to that of the old which appears good. Perhaps age 
rejects too much of the new that is good ; but the fault 
is remediable by larger education of individuals and con- 
sequently of society. 

For most mankind, these educable ages of forty to 
sixty are much too high, even with all the improvement 
in physique resulting from modern hygiene : educational 
courses usually are too severe for the brain of the man of 
forty or of the woman of thirty-five, and valueless for the 
character of the man or of the woman several years before 
that time. In this respect, the mental life runs a course 
equal and parallel with the physical. Man appears to 
be educable by formal processes for some thirty years ; 
that is, capable of development beyond the norm that 
may be attained without education by mere sufficiency 
of food, warmth, shelter, sleep, and exercise. But man 
is most educable in the earlier half of this period ; and 
the climactic years of educability may be assigned as in 
primary adolescence from fourteen to twenty in males 

1 Shaler, The Individual, p. 269. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 15 

of the Teutonic race and from thirteen to eighteen in 
females. Though there may be much learning after this 
period, the ideas acquired do not function later as effi- 
ciently in the modes of motives, habits, ideals,^ and 
judgments as do those acquired before the brain structure 
is finished and the adolescent ferment has subsided ; 
while ideas acquired before ten or twelve years of age 
are too insecure, perhaps partly from physiological or 
anatomical causes,^ but no doubt mainly from lack of 
experience (in other words, scarcity and vagueness of 
ideas), to remain the permanent and dominant possessions 
of the mind.^ 

Mere economic tradition and self-interest must not 
bhnd us to the fact that the half-dozen years of second- 
ary adolescence, from twenty to twenty-five, are quite as 
valuable for " conscious evolution " '' as are the half-dozen 
years before primary adolescence, which the fashion of 
American democracy has arbitrarily, complacently, and 
wantonly chosen for ''compulsory education."^ 

There is, it seems, a serious general misconception of the 
purpose of adolescent education. No physiologist or psy- 
chologist wonders at the success of the thousands of " self- 
made " men who have learned to read, to write, and to cipher 
after being "grown up," that is, at eighteen or twent}- years 
of age. Lincoln did his high school work with a teacher as a 
tutor after he had become a member of the legislature of 
Illinois, and benefited by that education : ^ his experience 
was not unusual, but typical. No physiologist or psychologist 
wonders at the failure of the thousands of high school and 
college educated men who never appreciated or soon forgot 
their "advantages." Truth cannot be set solidly into plastic 

1 Bagley, The Educative Process, chapters thus entitled. 

2 Donaldson, Growth of the Brain, chapter iv. 

* Hall, Adolescence, first three chapters. 

* Davidson, History of Education, preface. 

5 " The Educational Outlook," Journal of Pedagogy, July, 1905. 
® Curtis, Life of Lincoln, pp. 62-63. 



i6 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

minds ; before eighteen or twenty, all minds are plastic, or 
should be. The full period of secondary adolescence, from 
twenty to twenty-eight in men and from eighteen to twenty- 
five in women, is the right or best time for marriage, for the 
sufficient reason that docility or adjustability is still active, 
though declining, while the body is growing in strength, in 
weight, and in vigor. Monogamic marriage, indeed, is the 
latest important historical mode of education for man and for 
woman alike, and parentage is the final genetic process in 
the normal schooling of humanity.^ 

By what means and by what methods shall teachers 
proceed to educate childhood, youth, and young man- 
hood and womanhood ? Obviously by such as in theory 
and in practice have resulted in the best, the most nobly 
educated, men and women. Who have been, who are, 
these best and noblest men and women ? What means 
and what methods did their teachers employ to de- 
velop their qualities, to bring their powers to fruition, to 
produce in them sweetness and light, ^ sympathy and 
virtue, wisdom and power ? The answer is the tale of 
biography since the record of individual lives began. We 
know that certain men and women have been, must have 
been, well educated : by their fruits, we know them.^ 
They have met the standard of universal morals ; they 
have manifested the ideals of an abundant and aspiring 
life.^ Not one of them was perfect ; but some were flaw- 
less, sinless, just and fair in a noble sincerity, of whom 
Socrates was the type. To these ten thousand of the 
"just men made perfect,"^ from Moses to Lincoln, we 
must look for the ideals of education and for the methods 

1 Libby, " Shakespeare's Treatment of Adolescence," Pedagogical Sem- 
inary ; Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions, vol. iii, pp. 244-259. 

2 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. 

3 Matthew vii, 20. A saying of Jesus'. 

* John X, 10. " I am come that they might have life, and that they might 
have it more abundantly" (overflowingly, irepiao-Jv), a saying of Jesus'. 
5 Paul, Hebrews xii, 23. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 17 

of reaching or approximating these ideals. " Be ye there- 
fore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect," 
seems an impossible requirement.^ Men should be per- 
fectly prepared for this life that now is, just as God is 
perfectly able to live wholly His life. 

The means by which the best of earth were prepared 
for their lives have varied more in appearance than in 
reality. The good and great have known both society 
and solitude. The one makes and tests character, the 
other intelligence. A good man cannot grow alone upon 
a desert island ; nor can a great man grow in the throng 
of the crowded street. Emerson and Goethe are the 
teachers of a true wisdom ; but the opinion of neither 
is completely true. Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, 
each withdrew into the mountains and into the wilder- 
nesses "to pray." 

" True dignity abides with him alone 
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought. 
Can still suspect and still revere himself 
In lowliness of heart." 2 

Great and good men have ever loved the silences ; but 
they have also dared, must dare, the market-places with 
their many voices. In the dialectic of mental growth, 
we go forward by zigzag from experiences to reflection 
and back again to experiences ; and the most important 
of our experiences are those with men. When Tenny- 
son asked, — 

" Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, 
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime ?"^ 

he was perhaps too gloomy, and presented eloquently 
what should be considered with the cooler judgment of 

1 Matthew v, 48. The word reAeios, translated here "perfect," means 
complete, as in the case of the newborn babe, ready for this world, per- 
fect of its kind. The goal of the babe, which is birth, has been attained. 
The word does not mean perfect in the sense of final, ended. 

2 Wordsworth, Poems written in Youth, Lines, p. 33, Boston, 1854. 
^ Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. 



i8 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

psychology. The senses of children are indeed soaked 
and sodden by the too many and too intense sensations 
of the city street ; and souls are drowned there by sense- 
suffocation. The soul is bleached rather than blackened 
in the cavernous city, whose life, to those really knowing 
and understanding it, is rather quicksand than slime. It is 
true that the children of the tenements seldom grow into 
men and women of many talents. Lacking these, they 
remain poor. Yet how rich in the powers and graces of 
character are these tenement-poor! Is it not sadly true 
that the children of the isolated country districts seldom 
grow into men and women of equally philanthropic char- 
acter ? The inability of the country-bred youth to resist 
the temptations of city life is familiar to every observer. 
What Wordsworth wrote, — 

" The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," ^ 

is an impulse moving in the soul of every man who 
seeks the wilderness that he may recover himself from 
civilization. Of course, one may find solitude in a city 
room, and companionship upon the moor. The aphorism 
of Goethe must not be taken too literally.^ Emerson 
expressed the truth in this compact paragraph, — 

" Here again, as so often, Nature dehghts to put us between 
extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which 
we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and 
Society fatal. We must keep our heads in the one and our 
hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our 
independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonder- 
ful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require such 
a solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in 
the street and in palaces : for most men are cowed in society, 
and say good things to you in private, but will not stand 
to them in public. But let us not be the victims of words. 

1 Miscellaneous Sonneis, 1836. 

2 Legend, Part Three, p. 20 1 , iiifra. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 19 

Society and solitude are deceptive names. It is not the cir- 
cumstance of seeing more or fewer people, but readiness of 
sympathy, that imports ; and a sound mind will derive its 
principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the suffi- 
cient and absolute right, and will accept society as the natural 
element in which they are to be applied." ^ 

The school (o-xoAt;, leisure) is partly a matter of society 
{collegiiiniy bringing together) and partly a matter of 
solitude in study {sttcdiiim, effort). The school is the 
typical means of the teacher in his effort to educate the 
pupil. The school is perhaps too much a matter of 
the crowd. 2 Rousseau, Locke, and Mark Hopkins all con- 
sidered education a process for the society of but two, 
the teacher and the learner. We do not accept this ideal, 
pitying quite as much the lone pupil of tutor or gov- 
erness as the distracted pupil of the crowded, factoryized 
public school class with its overburdened instructor. 
Our ideal is part study and reflection in solitude, part in- 
dividual instruction by the teacher, part class recitation. 

Fortunate is the child or youth who may visit the 
lonely seacoast, the secluded forest, for weeks at a time 
in each year. There he may learn what Wordsworth, 
Bryant, Thoreau knew of the lessons of Nature. 

" Oh, there is not lost 
One of earth's charms : upon her bosom yet, 
After the flight of untold centuries, 
The freshness of her far beginning lies. 
And yet shall lie." » 

One who has known the varied glories of the natural 
world, who has seen perhaps through the eyes of some 
scientist, poet, philosopher, a part of the truth, knows a 
reserve, a poise, a health of the soul that should pre- 
serve him sweet and innocent in the thick of humanity ; 

1 Emerson, Society and Solitude^ final paragraph. 

2 Bryan, The Basis of Practical Teaching, chapter i. 

3 Bryant, A Forest Hymn. 



20 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

but only the world itself can teach him to be strong. 
Nature is like food ; society like exercise. Fortunate 
is that youth who, knowing Nature, has been severely 
tried among men. 

" If the chosen soul could never be alone 
In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, 
No greatness ever had been dreamed or done; 
Among dull hearts, a prophet never grew; 
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude. 

And who hath trod Olympus, from his eye 
Fades not that broader outlook of the gods ; 
His life's low valleys overbrow earth's clouds. 

He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods 
Doth walk a king ; for him the pent-up cell 
Widens beyond the circles of the stars, 
And all the sceptred spirits of the past 
Come thronging in to greet him as their peer; 
But in the market-place's glare and throng 
He sits apart, an exile, and his brow 
Aches with the mocking memory of its crown." ^ 

Even in early years, one may discern the truth de- 
clared by Carlyle, Ruskin, and Lowell, that society dries 
and seasons the soul as the kiln dries and seasons the 
wood from the forest. 

In the education of a man, there are many elements. 
We may collect some of them in the term Nature, and 
the rest in the term Human Nature. Or we may employ 
the terms Sciences, Arts, and Humanities. Again, all 
knowledge and all experience may be comprised within 
the terms Philosophy and History. Names often reflect 
methods, sometimes dictate them. For educational pur- 
poses, the method makes or mars the subject. 

Studies and exercises in public elementary schools are 
sometimes classified as Essentials and Non-essentials. These 
very terms demonstrate a utilitarian philosophy. High school 
1 Lowell, Cohimbiis. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 21 

courses are sometimes classified as Classical, Scientific, 
Technical, Commercial. These terms betray traditionalism, 
juxtapositing, accident, abject surrender to present opinion. 
A secondary pupil is said to "study Latin" for four or five 
years, a phrase that tells the pedagogical fact of grammar 
above thought, form above spirit. Still worse is the classifi- 
cation of disciplinary and informational subjects. These 
abortive terms disclose a mode of teaching that evidences 
not pedagogy or even methodology, but pseudo-philosophy. 
Yet this false philosophy, in defiance not only of modern psy- 
chology and of all common sense, but also of the old psycho- 
logy of the intellect (which every teacher has been supposed 
to know, whether applying it or not), has prevailed very gener- 
ally, and has driven more boys and girls out of school than 
all other causes, — social, economic, or whatever else, — sev- 
erally or taken together. The tale of arithmetic and the tale 
of grammar in the elementary schools have recited the ruin 
of two perfect subjects by drill. Every genuinely educational 
method involves concurrently information and habituation. 

The true analysis of knowledge for the purposes of 
education comports with the analysis of the presentation 
of thought in consciousness. In that presentation, I 
receive the sensation with a chorus of half-sensations, 
like echoes or overtones of a true note; while I, who 
receive it, am flooded with memories and imaginings 
from the past. The new sensation marks the present. 
It is a verity, without a history. In education, each fact 
is to be presented vividly, or not at all. It becomes a 
present or a presented fact, without a history. For the 
purposes of education, every presented fact should con- 
form to some philosophy. Unless essential in substance 
or in process to the education of the person receiving it, 
the fact, truth, principle, is foreign, inapplicable, and 
to be rejected. For the purposes of education, every 
fact used must belong properly and logically to the 
essentials. In education. Nature becomes subjective 
and wholly subordinate to human nature. Of course, 



22 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

this is true philosophically, though scientists and prac- 
tical persons sometimes like to forget it : scouting ideal- 
ism, they fail in sound psychology.^ Indubitably, the 
mind conditions, colors, and moulds whatever it discerns. 
The question of the learner. What is the use of knowing 
this ? may be unanswerable to him or by him ; but it 
must rouse in the mind of the teacher the correlative 
question, What is the use of teaching this ? This ques- 
tion the teacher must answer before proceeding farther 
lest in this respect he fail of being truly an educator. 

As for the distinctions of the Arts, the Sciences, and 
the Humanities, a chief article in the creed of every true 
scientist seems to be correctness in system,^ and of every 
true artist, perfect accord with fact.^ The humanitarian 
seeks for himself, his enterprise, his principle, social 
values ; and the societarian desires to lead men to truth, 
to beauty, and to goodness, respectively the ideals of 
the Sciences, the Arts, and the Humanities. For the pur- 
poses of education, we must preserve the wholeness, 
or at least the correlations, of knowledge. 

Because education is a system of successive efforts 
to effect presentations in consciousness, and there to 
affect their constitution, it must concern itself with me, 
the conscious being. Only in this sense is education 
influenced by history as such. The educator, as the 
maker of states of consciousness that are not accidental 
or incidental or occasional, but purposive and often sys- 

1 The argument in the text is not for idealism, but for some theory, 
any reasonable theory, that fairly accounts for the mutual interrelations 
of body and soul. Cf. Strong, IVAy the Mind has a Body, pp. 294, 295, 
341 etseq. His argument is for some " double aspect " theory, e. g. psy- 
chophysical idealism or perhaps panpsychism. 

2 " Mere system, of course, does not constitute a subject a science: ab- 
solute, unvarying, interpretative law is requisite." Fisher, Science, " Eco- 
nomics as a Science," August 31, 1906. 

3 As internally and spiritually perceived and understood. Esthetic 
perceptions are subjective: scientific perceptions are, in a sense, objec- 
tive. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 23 

tematic, and either consecutive or regular, must know the 
conditions governing the ego in consciousness. Thesfe 
conditions are largely physiological, and whatever is 
humanly physiological is necessarily the product of gen- 
eral biologic history. Man is the offspring of all the 
animals that went into his making.^ Moreover, their 
experiences, their consciousnesses, have left in man 
residuums, echoes, atmospheres, tones that tell the 
past.^ It is better so. We need to feel our kinship with 
all creatures and with all Nature. To accept this is not 
to deny the origin of the soul immediately from God. 
We may try to satisfy ourselves with definitions, saying 
perhaps that spirit is the one reality, the thing-in-itself, 
that mind is conscious spirit and matter unconscious 
spirit, and that soul is self-conscious mind ; but we know 
in our hearts that in truth we are not obligated to un- 
derstand the relation between God and Nature, or that 
between mind and body, for we are finite and are not to 
be called upon to produce the infinite. We are creators 
of nothing whatever. Only God needs to know what man 
really is.^ At best, we see only in part.'' Our only duty 
is to see clearly the part within our vision. To do this, we 
must cheerfully accept the truth, whatever truth is de- 
monstrated to our reason.^ The need of truth is general, 
not particular or special : it is not only a religious need, 
or a psychological, or an educational, or a scientific,*^ but 
it is all these. True or false ; that is the only question.'^ 
Truth is the price of freedom, which is the goal of 

1 Darwin, Descent of Man, chapters ii, vi. 

2 Hall, Adolescence, chapter x; Darwin, op. cit. chapter iii. 
2 I.otze, Microcosjtiiis, book ii, chapter ii. 

4 I Corinthians ix, 9-12, expresses this philosophy of Paul. 

^ " It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe any- 
thing upon insufficient evidence." Clifford, Essays, p. 344. 

^ " Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you 
into all truth." Jesus, John, Gospel xvi, 13. 

' Huxley, Sciefice and Culture, p. 240. 



24 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

man, the mark of his sonship to God, the perfectly 

free. 

" For He that worketh high and wise, 
Nor pauses in His plan, 
Will take the sun out of the skies 
Ere freedom out of man." ^ 

As the scientific method for developing freedom in 
man and in society, education must use truth and truth 
only, but truth skillfully. " The truth," said Jesus, " shall 
make you free." ^ But skillful teaching of truth is simply 
teaching truth by methods true to the human mind. 
These methods are summarized in the sciences, that is, 
the systematized truths as far as we know them, of psy- 
chology and of pedagogy or education. Education, there- 
fore, must operate in the light of the consciousness of 
man, which has been built up through all the ages.-^ This 
is the familiar "recapitulation theory,"^ which should 
be pressed by education much farther than is yet com- 
mon in practice. By this theory, the individual repeats 
in body and in mind the history of the race. In strict 
truth, he repeats in body the tale of his own particular 
ancestry,^ and in soul the tale of those who have become 
known to him and who have been appreciated by him. 
He repeats, and he varies.^ In his variability lies all 
his hope of progress. His physical recapitulation and 
his physical variability are narrow enough compared 

1 Emerson, Concord Ode. 

2 John, Gospel viii, 32. 

3 Hall, Heirs of the Ages, pamphlet. 

* Drummond, Ascent of Man, chapter iv; Baldwin, Mental Develop- 
ment,'^'^. \df et seq. The terra " culture epochs theory" does not fully 
cover its content. 

5 Up to the period of conception in the case of his father, and of birth 
or perhaps of weaning in the case of his mother. The experience of aged 
men and women cannot pass to posterity via heredity. The text does not 
deny or assert that the soul is likewise inherited. If it is, how fortunate 
that we inherit the bodies and souls of youth and of early maturity only I 

^ Darwin, Origin of Species, chapter ii. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 25 

with the possibiUties of his psychical repetitions and 
differentiations, which depend largely upon his educa- 
tional opportunities. In his soul, he may repeat, he may 
even improve upon, the emotions, thoughts, impulses, 
of the very greatest and best men who ever lived before 
him or are living now. It is this phase of the possible 
recapitulations of man that education is too much dis- 
posed to ignore. 

To suppose that repeating the economic history, or 
the social, or the religious, or the cultural is enough for 
a highly educated individual is quite as fallacious as to 
suppose that such a repetition of the history of nations 
is enough for a new nation "in the foremost files of 
time." The familiar summary, " Ontogeny recapitulates 
phylogeny," is a truth; but one that does not go far 
enough for education. As a beginning, we should con- 
cern ourselves with the principle that no man can develop 
soundly save by repeating every stage and every step 
by which the race has progressed. Thus, the individual 
is made human by being humanized in embryo and in 
independent body, in infantile and maturing soul. He 
develops best as well as most rapidly who takes the 
smallest number of false steps and delays least at the 
various stages: he is neither distracted from his pur- 
pose to grow nor arrested in his growth. Therefore, 
that education is best which avoids the pitfalls and pro- 
ceeds to the goal. 

The child and youth will think of stealing and of 
killing : restrained in these thoughts, to him property and 
sanctity of life come to be realities. He will inevitably 
desire to be indolent: encouraged in industry, to him 
work becomes a moral duty. He will lie, he will lust, 
he will imagine treacheries and dishonors, he will devise 
all historic sins, as did his ancestors, animal and human : 
let him inhibit these psychoses, and he will achieve 
truthfulness, chastity, fealty, honor. Though it be granted 



26 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

that one who gives way to these ancestral promptings 
and indulges them may yet, after the satisfactions of 
experience, clear and clean his soul and develop beyond 
them, upon the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis,^ 
two things still remain true : that he who never steals 
or murders or idles or lies or otherwise sins will most 
quickly and most surely attain moral freedom and intel- 
lectual power, and that society will have no harsh or pitying 
memories of him to cloud its picture of his final virtue. 
What society, in its successive stages, has agreed to call 
" vice " or '' sin" has not been the highway either to per- 
sonal virtue or to social favor, though moral fault has 
often been the highway to power, and society has for- 
given much to those who have served its greater interests. 

Jesus taught us to pray, " Lead us not into temptation,^ 
but deliver us from evil." To be consistent, one who argues 
that the child must be savage, barbarian, hunter, shepherd, 
farmer, mechanic, clerk, scholar, statesman, and more, in 
order to realize himself through conscious repetition of race 
history, should also argue that he must be slayer, thief, forni- 
cator, idler, liar, sloven, traitor, and worse, if worse there be; 
for man morally has manifested all these criminal and base 
creatures. The psychoses of all these ancestral experiences 
endure more or less darkly or clearly in every human being: 
they are our latent or potent temptations.* 

1 Nicomachean Ethics ; Politics / also cf. Virttce and Vice, probably 
not written by him. 

2 " For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities ; but was in all points tempted like as we are, 
yet without sin." Paul ( ? ), Hebrews iv, 15. 

3 " But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust 
after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." Mat- 
thew V, 28. A saying of Jesus'. 

" Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house . . . nor any thing that 
is thy neighbour's." Exodus xx, 17. To covet is to be ready to take. 
These outgrown psychoses are all too ready to waken into will. We 
inherit the youth of our ancestors. This is physical good fortune ; but 
perhaps psychical ill fortune, for the virtues acquired in late life — tem- 
perance, prudence, self-command, and self-restraint — are not trans- 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 27 

In this phase of the recapitulation theory, there is 
a truth for pedagogy. Upon evidence of a new psy- 
chosis, echoing the past, the educator should endeavor 
to check at once whatever is bad (i. e. contrary to mod- 
ern morals), and to develop quickly and fully whatever 
is good (i. e. in conformity with essential morals). The 
evil instinct is to be encouraged to atrophy. It is the 
duty of pedagogy to know how to check, to cut off, to 
paralyze, or to encyst the bad in its nascent period.^ 
This is one of the essential methods of education. 

It may seem narrow, one-sided, partial, to evaluate 
education thus in the terms of morals ; but upon reflec- 
tion such an evaluation is thoroughly sound. Morals are 
not wholly a matter of will and but slightly a matter of 
feeling : they are largely a matter of intellect. Socrates 
was altogether right when he argued that *' knowledge 
is virtue." An intelligent man cannot be moral in mat- 
ters above his comprehension, nor can an ignorant man 
be moral in matters outside of his knowledge. 

The law is theoretically a system for executing justice 
between man and society and between man and man. It is 
a metaphysic designed to interpret right and wrong in terms. 
It is also an ethic designed to reduce the metaphysical- terms 
to concrete realities. The " quibbles " of the law, however, 
are quite as notorious as are the subtleties of scholasticism. 
In matters of right and wrong, hair-splitting is often inev- 
itable. In consequence, the law requires very able men in 
its administration ; and its applications demonstrate by 
induction that moraUty is conditioned by intelligence. Only 
the wise judge can be righteous in difficult cases. 

Government is carried on by men, some of whom are 
incapable of comprehending their tasks. Many an intellectual 
blunder or error has been charged to moral turpitude. "To 

mitted. Each man must discipline himself, that he may manifest the life 
of reason. Cf. Santayana, The Life of Reason, passim. 

1 Ellis, " Philosophy of Y.dMZ2X\ox\.,''' Pedagogical Seminary, October, 

1897. 



28 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

be faithful to one's own " is sound family morals, but it is 
vicious government procedure until "one's own" are con- 
ceived as enlarged to include all the community : such en- 
largement of vision is beyond the intellect of some legislators 
and officers of the State. Men of narrow experience often go 
astray in government affairs for want of criteria of judg- 
ment. 

There is a large aspect of the recapitulation theory that 
is social. The individual is to discover for himself that 
great life which the race has wrought for itself in and 
through civilization. He will not become wholly human 
until he knows what the associations and institutions 
of mankind are and what they mean. As long as this 
knowledge is denied him and in the degree in which it 
is denied to him, so long and in this degree he is out- 
side of humanity. In this phase of sociological theory, 
he is not yet conscious of his kinship ; ^ and here human- 
ity is conceived not as real mankind, but as the ideal 
mankind that we believe we are helping to produce. 
It belongs to education to introduce the growing mind 
to these social institutions. 

Education may be described more easily than it may 
be defined. It is a system of processes for liberalizing 
the soul. The most highly educated man is he who is 
most free, farthest-sighted, strongest in purpose, kindest 
among men. To be highly educated is to desire truth, to 
admire beauty, to love goodness. To desire truth is to 
seek facts, and within the facts laws, and to abandon the 
falsities clearly exposed by the truths. To admire beauty 
is to see into the harmonies and concords of Nature 
and of Art, and to appreciate their order, peace, and 
propriety. To be good is to avoid sin, which is harming 
others or one's self, and to seek righteousness, which is 
helping others or one's self without sin. Goodness is a 
matter of the will, as every one knows ; truth, a matter 

1 Giddings, Principles of Sociology, chapter i. 



THE NATURE OF EDUCATION 29 

of the intellect ; beauty, a matter of the heart. They are 
various aspects of the soul. 

With these excellent qualities, a diseased or awkward 
or depraved body scarcely comports. Therefore, not for 
its own sake, but for the sake of its inmate, the soul, the 
body is to be nourished, exercised, and trained. Not 
weight or size or strength, but grace, vigor, and health 
are the signs of a body fit for an excellent soul. The 
body is to be the servant of the self-conscious spirit. 
These are but commonplaces ; and yet for want of 
them many a scholar and many an athlete has gone to 
ruin. 

Education has but one proper manner ; this is order- 
liness.^ It includes calmness, timeliness, propriety, pur- 
pose, completeness. Education has, it is true, time for 
ecstasy ; but it is the ecstasy of poetry, not of hysteria. 
Education has a time for conflict ; but it is the conflict 
of deliberate warfare, not of fanatic riot. Education has 
a time for dreaming ; but it is the dreaming in revery, 
not in hallucination and in delusion. Order is the man- 
ner of education, which is the method of approach to 
heaven, the scene and evidence of the life eternal. 

Education seeks to discover, to produce, and to perfect 
that harmony which is the essential nature of the soul.^ 
For what is the soul but a harmony of all the powers ; 
and what can heaven be but a harmony of educated 
souls ? So Plato reasoned,^ and Jesus taught.^ 

1 "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose 
under the heaven : a time to be born, and a time to die ; . . . a time to 
break down, and a time to build up ; ... a time to keep silence, and a 
time to speak ; . . . a time of war, and a time of peace." Ecclesiastes 
iii, 1-8. "A certain order, then, proper to each, becoming inherent in 
each, makes each thing good." Plato, Gorgias, § 133. 

2 " The harmonious unfolding of the soul is the supreme end of 
the art of life." Hoffding, Problems of Philosophy (Fisher, transl.), 
p. 162. 

3 Socrates speaking, Phcsdo, § 99. 
* Cf. Mark xii, 32-34. 



30 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

Forever the new birth, forever regeneration, forever 
natura, being born ! Such is education. Its limit may 
no man set.^ Each generation manifests the superman. 
Always comes the new heaven upon a new earth.^ 

" Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll ! 
Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last. 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea." 3 

1 *' Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the 
heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love 
him." Paul, i Corinthians ii, 9. 

2 The climax of each succeeding civilization is always higher than 
the preceding. No dream of a better age to come ever is as beautiful 
in comparison with the old as is the actual age when it comes. 

3 Holmes, The Chambered N'autilus. 



CHAPTER II 

VALUES OF THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 

Individuals may form communities; but it is institutions alone that can create a 
nation. — Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield), Manchester Speech, 1866. 

Upon earth is no power that may be compared with the State. — Pollock, Science of 
Politics, p. 126. 

Neither race nor tradition, nor yet the actual past binds the American to his country- 
man, but rather the future which together they are building. — MOnsterberg, The 
Americans, p. 5. 

Throughout the world of civilized mankind, society 
manifests, in greater or less completeness, eight great 
social institutions, — Property, Family, Church, State, 
School, Culture, Business, and War. From many thou- 
sand years ago in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, until now, 
these institutions have been gradually evolving. How 
ancient they are in India and in China, I do not under- 
take to say : it suffices that wherever civilization arises, 
there arise also these institutions to develop, to con- 
centrate, to cherish, and to destroy the customs" and 
interests of a common humanity. Of the individual, 
whether in ancient Chaldea, in mediaeval Europe, or 
in modern Japan or England or the United States, it is 
reasonable to say that the largeness of his life depends 
mainly upon the extent of his identification with the first 
six institutions and realization of their opportunities, and 
of his understanding of the last two. It may be added 
that to withdraw or to be withdrawn from any of them 
is at the peril of narrowness and anxiety of life. 

The fact that in historical civilization woman has 
generally been property rather than the owner of pro- 
perty, practically enslaved by marriage, silent in the 
church, unrecognized in the state, almost never at school, 



32 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

without knowledge of literature, music, or art, and at 
best but a servant in business, tells the bitter story of 
the vulgar philosophy of humanity. All ignorant men, 
like some intelligent scientists, believe in heredity and 
doubt environment and education. They are fataUsts. 
They idolize function and instinct. They are routinists 
and caste-worshipers. The behef of intelligent men, 
excepting only a few of the scientists, is that heredity 
is not fate, that indeed heredity may be modified by 
education and by other environment, and that these 
modifications may be transmitted to offspring. If this 
belief conforms to the facts, it follows from the facts 
that to the progress of humanity the progress of woman 
by participation in the activities of religion, of govern- 
ment, and of education must be advantageous. 

Doubtless, to the completeness of this argument, some 
consideration of the relative influences of father and of 
mother upon the child is desirable ; but limitations of space 
and the digressive nature of the topic forbid full treatment. 
The weight of evidence and opinion seems to be that (i) in 
general, the boy is like the mother, the girl like the father; 
(2) heredity crosses at adolescence so that the adult tends 
toward the parent less closely resembled in childhood ; (3) in 
skin, flesh, muscle, the child resembles the mother more 
than the father, but in skeleton, form, and general structure 
resembles the father more than the mother; (4) mind and 
character are not inherited, though they are conditioned 
by the physical inheritance ; (5) a habit acquired by one 
parent is scarcely transmissible, but if acquired by both 
parents may be transmissible, and, if acquired continuously 
in all lines for three or more generations, will probably be 
transmitted.^ 

^ Example. The son or daughter of two parents, four grandparents, 
and eight great-grandparents, all highly educated and sound physically 
in manhood and in womanhood, is easily edu cable, probably displaying 
almost or quite without suggestion the mental and moral habits taught 
to his or her ancestors. Darwin, Origin of Species, launched this world- 
wide controversy. Patten, Heredity and Social Progress, chapter ii. 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 33 

To the correctness of this belief, the progress of the 
United States since the prevalence of the education 
of women is fair evidence. In the face of the incal- 
culably great services of emancipated women to their 
peoples and to their times, — Elizabeth, Victoria, Cath- 
erine, Marian Evans, Harriet Beecher Stowe, — the vul- 
gar philosophy, that in the interests of humanity woman 
may rightly be limited to the functions of child-bearing 
and of child-rearing, seems incredibly ignorant.^ Such 
ignorance is part and parcel of human nature as mani- 
fested in a considerable portion of mankind ; and with 
it, educators should reckon. It may be that because of 
our prosperity most of us tolerate rather than advocate 
and support the education of woman. And yet in our 
worst years of business depression, though we may talk 
of closing our high schools, no one has suggested denying 
our girls equal privileges with our boys in elementary 
schools. 

The fact that for centuries, throughout Christendom 
and all heathendom that is visited by its missionaries, 
the Roman Catholic Church has enforced the celibacy 
of its clergy, removing them from the family as parents, 
and has limited them in matters of property, of govern- 
ment, and of business, does not prove the wisdom of 
such limitations, but raises the questions whether the 
individuals have not been sacrificed to the institution, 
and whether the institution itself has not thereby been 
limited in its own success.^ It may be that the redemp- 
tion of the world requires martyrs, and that an institu- 
tion must be maintained to train, to discipline, and to 
support men who are primarily social functionaries and 
therefore essentially martyrs ; but that such martyrdom 
is a manifest mode of education to be imitated by a 

^ Charlotte Gilman, Human Work; Woman and Economics^ both 
passim. 

^ Fisher, History 0/ the Christian Church, pp. (i^, loi, 173, 174, 183. 



34 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

considerable portion of mankind is not in the least a 
debatable question, for it is an absolutely necessary con- 
dition of human society. 

The man who has inherited property, who has known 
the care of parents and the love of wife and children, 
who has participated in the affairs of government and 
of religion, who has benefited by the school, who knows 
the arts of culture, and who has tried his powers in 
business is the larger for all his experiences ; and no 
amount of experience in one or more of these fields but 
not in all can make up for its absence in others. The 
woman, likewise. To say that property tends to idle- 
ness, family to aloofness, government to corruption, 
religion to hypocrisy, education to egotism, culture to 
conceit, and business to selfishness is but to say that 
personal motives may pervert the good to the base. To 
say these things is once more to indulge ourselves in an 
unhappy and vulgar philosophy.^ Each social institution 
has its own characteristic motive ; yet grouping the in- 
stitutions is possible. Property, Family, Church, State, 
School, Business,^ Culture, do, indeed, all tend to the 
domestic peace of society. Civil warfare is their antitype. 
They are cosmos ; War, chaos. In their methods and 
means. Property, Business, War, and Culture are pri- 
marily personal, while Family, Church, State, and School 
are primarily social. A true profession serves an insti- 
tution by devising appropriate methods and means by 
which it may perform its functions. Society is the trea- 
sury of such methods and means. The first and lesser 
institutions content themselves with servants, to each 



^ To each man, his philosophy. In the degree of his reflection upon 
life, that philosophy is individual. The vulgar philosophy is traditional, 
social, superficial, inconsistent, and plausible. Wisdom seeks to cleanse 
the mind of all such philosophy. 

2 This is true of business only as a body of industries; it is not true 
of business as competitive selling of goods, or of services. 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 35 

institution its peculiar class : Property ^ has the poHce- 
man ; Business, the mechanic and the clerk ; War, the 
soldier ; Culture, the artist and the expositor. The second 
and greater institutions have their professions : Family- 
has the physician ; Religion,^ the clergyman ; Govern- 
ment, the lawyer ; and Education, the teacher. 

In this democratic age, when humanity, failing to 
realize its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, out 
of defeat has risen to the higher ideals of justice, inde- 
pendence, and opportunity, we are likely to be deceived, 
by the excessive authority of the State, into thinking it 
the one truly universal institution of society. There is 
to-day little into which the modern State does not in- 
quire and little in which it does not interfere.^ That the 
State is usurping functions proper only to other social 
institutions is believed by many. That it is patronizing 
and subordinating the School, truckling to Property, sac- 
rificing some of its own best interests to Business, modi- 
fying the Family (scarcely improving it thereby), and 
deliberately isolating itself from the Church, is also be- 
lieved by many : to no slight extent, these measures are 
reducing the sphere of liberty.^ 

In their motives and aims. Church and School are 
primarily personal ; but in whatever respects Family 
and State are personal, they are in danger of being 
vicious. It is the personal legislation of the State that 
threatens the peace and the welfare of general society. 

^ Wealth is sometimes considered as synonymous with Property-and- 
Business, and is treated as one social institution. The appearance of being 
synonymous is mere appearance ; the reality of difference is developed 
in the text at various places. 

2 Church and Religion, State and Government, etc., are not synony- 
mous terms : they do, however, denote the same matter, while affording 
somewhat different connotations. 

' Mill, Liberty ; Spencer, Social Statics. 

* Butler, " Principles of Education," Educational Review, June, 1902, 
p. 190, discusses the aspects of this matter in relation to the University. 



36 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

The State has legitimate functions ; but it has so far 
overreached these functions that some persons fear and 
others hope ^ that it may become the sole authoritative 
and independent social institution. No doubt, if govern- 
ment is the dominant concern of mankind, then society 
organized as a State and performing therein all social 
functions would be logical ; but perhaps religion and 
education are quite as important concerns, requiring for 
their proper development and full service to mankind 
entire freedom from the State. In respect to the School, 
it may indeed prove that the State must serve and not 
rule. 

The characteristic motive of Property is self-realiza- 
tion through ownership of the things of the objective 
world. Acquisition is its accent. Possession is its em- 
phasis. Transmission to the heirs of the body is its 
climax. The slow music of the monotonous melody of 
Property is the funeral dirge of the spirit. To desire 
to be rich as a goal is significant of arrest of develop- 
ment, for the property instinct characterizes later child- 
hood ; 2 as a preparation for adolescence, as a stage, 
marking perhaps high-water level of some adult crea- 
ture forerunning man,^ activity in property-getting may 
be commendable. But property as sole or chief object 
in life becomes a stumbling-block, whatever may be the 
opinions of the many or of the millionaire.* Property 
founds the leisure class, which is at once the treasury of 
culture, the fortress of ethics, and the palace of luxury, 
with all that these symbols involve. But property is 

1 Hillquit, History of Socialism. This, it may be, is the largest ques- 
tion now under consideration in the Western world. 

2 Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child-Study, p. 206 ; Klein-France, 
" Psychology of Ownership," Pedagogical Seminary, vol. vi, pp. 421-470. 

^ Hall, Adolescence, p. 45. 

* " A man's first duty," said President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech 
in 1903, "is to his family; his next to the State." It is doubtful 
whether, in either particular, history sustains this familiar thesis. 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 37 

only the necessity, not the ambition of the leisure class/ 
whose members are at once the scum and the cream of 
society. Thus the wheat and the tares are growing, to be 
gathered together for the harvest. A life without pro- 
perty is a life without background. A life with property 
and nothing else is a life without foreground. Property 
is the right to exclude all others from use of the thing 
owned.2 Originally it presumed physical power to resis't 
all others. Now it necessitates society organized poten- 
tially (covertly but ready to be overtly) to serve the owner 
against the trespasser. ^ Property preceded a common 
humanity, even any humanity, for animals recognize it. 
An individual without property in civilization is a 
most pathetic object. He usually seems to lack true 
personality. A civilization with many such individuals 
stands convicted of social iniquity. The fact, unremedied 
and continued, is an advertisement of the public guilt of 
all. Tolstoi was a benefactor of humanity when he drew 
upon all the resources of his superb literary art to re- 
store to health a truth long " bedridden in the dormitory 
of the soul" ^ and declared year after year, "Yes, we 
will do almost anything for the poor man, anything but 
get off his back."5 Emerson stated the principle- with 
perfect clearness in respect to the most important of all 
kinds of property when he said, *' Whilst another man 
has no land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is at 
once vitiated. "« But this is just as true of every other 
necessary of life. Of two poor women in a tenement, 
one with bread, the other with no bread, let us learn 
once more the doctrine of John, "We know that we 

1 Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class. 

2 Holmes, Common Law, chapter i. 

8 The right of property issues out of the power of one class over all 
others. Gumplowicz, Sociology, p. 179. 
* Coleridge, Aids to Reflection. 

5 Quoted, ^xari^Xxvgiou, Philanthropy and Morality. 

6 " Man the Reformer," Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 234. 



38 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

have passed from death unto life, because we love the 
brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in 
death." ^ " Behold ! No land like this barren and naked 
land of poverty could show the moral geology of the 
world." ^ This, however, is no reason for continuing 
poverty forever in the world. It is rather a very good 
reason for listening to the revelations of poverty con- 
cerning morals, and for discontinuing the causes of pov- 
erty so far as possible. These causes appear to form a 
vicious circle ; they may be cited as ignorance, fraud, and 
disease.^ The circle can, however, be broken by govern- 
ment, when it destroys privilege ; by science, when it 
prevents disease and hastens the cure ; and by educa- 
tion, when it enlightens ignorance and develops power. 

The characteristic motive of the Family is self- 
sacrifice. The ancient patriarch owned his sons and 
daughters-in-law and all their descendants. Out of this 
ownership of consort and of lineal descendants in the 
male line (and unmarried daughters) ^ grew the modern 
family, as we know it in Europe and in America. In the 
Family, the individual foregoes his own economic advan- 
tage. Property is in common use, even though the title 
be in the head.^ For the sake of his kin, the individual 



1 I Epistle iii, 14. 

2 Phillips Brooks, Sermons, 5th series, p. i66. 

3 Cf. Ross, Social Control, p. 382. 

* The daughters at marriage took their dowry as their share in the 
general family property. Maine (Pollock, ed. New York, tenth edition), 
Ancient Law, p. 218. 

5 To the historian familiar with anthropology, the modem statute laws 
giving the married woman control of her own property, granting alimony 
to divorced wives, and preserving very limited rights to husbands in their 
deceased wives' estates, and the laws relating to wills, are invasions of 
the sacred precincts of Property and of Family, are declarations that 
individuals are greater than these primary social institutions, and are 
challenges (perhaps presumptuous and perilous) of the very method by 
which modern society has come into being. Cf. Howard, History of Mat' 
rimonial Institutions, vol. iii, chapter xviii. 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 39 

is glad to imperil life itself. Self-denial for the sake of 
others in the family is so common as to pass unnoticed. 
This denial attains often the dignity of self-sacrifice, 
occasionally the glory of martyrdom in life and in death. 
In the history of the Family, we may trace the steps by 
which man has ascended to humanity.^ 

As the secondary purpose of Property is to secure 
to posterity wealth and its accompanying advantages in 
material civilization, so the secondary purpose of the 
Family is to secure to posterity culture and the spiritual 
civilization. Older than Church and State, Property and 
Family underlie all religious and political laws, customs, 
ceremonies, and traditions. Possession and title, mar- 
riage, and parental and filial obligation are stronger than 
worship, ceremonial, and religion, — stronger than power, 
politics, and government.^ We may liken family affec- 
tion to atomic affinity, religious association to molecular 
attraction, and patriotism to mass gravitation. In the 
day of social dissolution and anarchy, only the Family 
endures, and the last fight is for the land and the home. 

The personal motive inculcated by the Church is self- 
abnegation. Reverence for the Higher Power is the 
melody of the religious life. The origin of the Church 
was in the convenience of differentiating the religious 
functions of the patriarch and of integrating them in the 
priestly office.^ It scarcely appears that the primitive 
man was a worshiper of his gods and devils ; but out of 
the savage fears and superstitions ^ of primitive man 
grew the ceremonial rites and worship of the barbarian. 
As guardian of the ritual and of the ceremonial arose 
the priest ; and with the priest appeared the Church. 
Isolated from heavy labor, from the hunt, and from war, 

1 Drummond, Ascent of Matt, chapter vii. 

2 Cf. Sophocles, Antigone. 

3 Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. iii ; Maspero, Egypt (transl. 
Sayce-McClure), vol. ii, chapter i. 

* Fiske, Idea of God, p. 166. 



40 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

the priest observed, thought, acquired knowledge, and 
became wise beyond other men. He saw that the world 
is mystery, and learned the power of mystery by partly 
resolving it into knowledge.^ This process, begun seven 
thousand years ago,^ may be observed to-day, when a 
man arises from among ignorant manual laborers to 
become priest, preacher, statesman, or other scholar. He 
feels his littleness in the immensity and the eternity of 
the universe of God; and teaches others so. P'oreverthe 
burden of his sermon is self-abnegation. '* Be ye recon- 
ciled." "Not my will, but Thine be done." "Thy will 
be done on earth as it is in heaven." Such has been the 
revelation proclaimed in every age by the prophets and 
the priests. It is a mystic and esoteric doctrine ; but its 
power, its influences, and its results have been visible in 
all the recorded history of mankind. It has compelled 
introspection, made revery, silence, and solitude sacred, 
immeasurably dignified the individual, and evolved the 
conscience of man, which, though indefinable, is neverthe- 
less undeniable and tends to universality. By religion, 
the creature man is bound directly and intimately to his 
creating God. The real savage, before the days of Pro- 
perty, of Family, and of Religion, lived a unit upon the 
surface of Nature. Property gave man largeness through 
self-realization, while the Family gave him permanence 
through a recognized continuity of generation, conse- 
quent upon the social relations of blood-kindred. The 
Church gave man worth by developing, according to its 
dogmas, consciousness of sonship to the Power of whose 
thought this world is but a passing form.^ 

1 Titchener, Outlines of Psychology, chapter i. 

2 Mitchell, The Past in the Present. Without a knowledge of this 
theory, as expressed by historians and by philosophers, and as displayed 
in a multitude of modern facts, the present civilization is scarcely under- 
standable. 

8 Luke, A<:tSy quoting Paul, " For in him we live and move and have 
our being." 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 41 

Through self-surrender, man acquires dignity. " Who- 
soever will save his life shall lose it," said Jesus.^ It is 
scientifically demonstrable. The discovery of this truth 
is the new birth. ^ " Ye must be born again," said He to 
Nicodemus. By this birth, self becomes, in sympathy, 
coextensive with the cosmos,^ securing thereby moral 
sanity, and death ceases to have the meaning of fear or 
of regret. The man who really loses himself gains the 
whole world."* It is the moral of all heroisms and martyr- 
doms. 

"What excites and interests the lookers-on at life, what the 
romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic mon- 
uments recall, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light 
with those of darkness, — with heroism reduced to its bare 
chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of 
death." * 

Younger than the Church, evolving out of Church, 
Family, and Property, arose the State with its double 
function, external and internal, like the obverse and 
the reverse of a shield. One function of the State is to 
protect a particular society of men, women, and children 
with their particular forms of religion, of marriage, and 
of property, from all other societies. In respect to this 
function, the State is the organizer of defensive war.^ It 
is an interesting instance of differentiation and of in- 
tegration.^ In organizing aggressive war, the State is 

1 Matthew xvi, 25. 

2 John iii, 4. 

8 Naden, Induction and Deduction {Hydo-Idealism), p. 174. 

* The man who, in the popular sense, " loses himself " in vice, does not 
really lose himself at all. He is enslaved to self, degraded to that wor- 
ship, and at last lost from the world in the sole "society" of himself. 
Dante showed the liar thus lost from the world in lowest hell upon a 
pinnacle of ice. 

^ James, Talks on Psychology and Life's Ideals, p. 272. 

6 Bluntschli, Theory of the State, Oxford transl., p. 320. 

' It is unnecessary to do more than to acknowledge my obligation to 



42 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

usually acting in the sole interest of Property. Land- 
hunger, proper or artificial, has set in motion most wars. 
The army and the navy exist for aggression, while the 
militia and the marine exist for defense. 

Beginning as a means to preserve for a society its 
peculiar institutions, the State has grown into a machine 
for modifying and even controlling and directing them. 
Both property and family, both religion and education, 
both culture and business, have assumed voluntarily or 
involuntarily unnatural forms because of the force and 
influence of political government. In the period of 
nation-making intolerance is a political necessity.^ The 
State has meddled, not always from necessity, in all the 
various affairs of human society.^ 

The State has several conspicuous weaknesses. It has no 
voluntarily and, in consequence, liberally granted means of 
support ; therefore, it is inadequately supplied with wealth 
for its several needs, especially for its need of superior talents 
to be employed in its service. In its democratic forms, it has 
no permanence either of personnel or of specific traditions,^ 
changing its men and its purposes as public opinion wills.* 
Every other social institution — Family, Church, School, 
State, Culture, War — is finally dependent upon either 
Property or Business for revenue.^ The State has felt itself 

Spencer, Principles of Sociology^ etc., for the theory. " Evolution is a 
continuous change from indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to definite, 
coherent heterogeneity of structure and function, through successive 
differentiations and integrations." Rogers, History of Philosophy, p. 510. 
This is a more compact statement than is anywhere offered by Spencer 
himself. 

1 Seeley, Introduction to Political Science^ p. 137. 

2 The necessity of the State in respect to property is solely to derive 
revenues from it. The State, however, has undertaken to create many 
forms of property, such as corporations, franchises, titles, mortgages, 
money. 

^ Bryce, American Commonwealth, vol. ii, p. 572. 
* Oliver, Alexander Hamilton, p. 164. 

fi Government is founded upon property. ^Nebsiex, Speech at Plymouth, 
1820. 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 43 

forced or has deliberately chosen upon many occasions, in 
order to secure large funds for its support, either to bribe or 
to overpower Property or Business to meet its demands.^ 

Civilization has been the scene of many struggles 
between the eight major social institutions. In the first 
decades of the twentieth century, the terrific struggle 
for mastery is between the State and Business for the 
control of society: the other institutions are standing 
by as little more than onlookers. The Church, indeed, 
and the Family, are disintegrating before our eyes : 
neither has sufficient surplus vitality to take part in the 
struggle. Culture, with its overlord, the University, 
stands aloof. Whether its revenues come from govern- 
ment or from property, the University cares but little 
save in so far as its own academic freedom is involved.^ 

The School has joined the State in its struggle for 
supremacy, and in return has secured the support of 
the State for its own maintenance. This singular alli- 
ance has resulted in making the School almost wholly 

^ Of bribes to business, many protective tariff laws have been exam- 
ples. Of threats to overthrow Property as a social institution, " con- 
demnation proceedings " are examples. In a certain sense, every tax, 
direct or indirect, is confiscatory. Of course, both Business and" Pro- 
perty have methods and means of revenge, familiar enough to all social 
observers. 

^ It is a fair question whether there is greater academic freedom in 
the State University or in the " endowed " or Property University. There 
is, however, no little evidence that a University that draws its revenues 
directly from Business (as by fees or current donations) and a University 
that draws its revenues from the Church (mediating between Culture and 
Property or Business) are both certain not to have genuine and complete 
academic freedom. Whether the University draws its millions of annual 
revenue directly from Property ("invested funds "), or from Business 
(gifts), or from the State (" grants " or taxes), or from the Church makes 
no difference in the amount of the burden thereby imposed upon so- 
ciety ; but it makes a very great deal of difference to the University itself 
because the mediating persons who collect the revenues affect, in the 
degrees of their power, and in accordance with their social obligations, 
the policy of expenditure. 



44 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

dependent upon the State ^ and in emphasizing in all 
school courses the aim of preparation for citizenship as 
paramount, which in sound social philosophy it certainly 
is not. 

The American State has chosen to assume for the 
public school the tremendous responsibility of Ameri- 
canizing an annual number of immigrants ranging from 
one to two per cent of the entire old population. To 
Americanize means to adapt to all our institutions, — 
marriage, religion, property, business, military service, 
as well as education and culture. Such an assumption 
amounts almost to a usurpation of all the functions 
proper to Society itself. This assumption illustrates per- 
fectly the arrogance of the modern democratic State, 
falsely conceiving itself to be coterminous, synonymous, 
yes, identical with Society.^ In a mad delusion. State- 
socialism arises, in which a State-Society is conceived, a 
far more dreadful notion than the historic State-Church. 
No such terror can, however, come to pass, for the world 
sees age after age not combination and consolidation 
with coincident integration of the whole, but variation 
and differentiation with coincident integration of the 
parts. The State will not synthesize all institutions into 
one State-Society, but rather will Society itself produce 
yet other institutions to reduce the State to smaller pre- 
tensions and to greater efficiency in its proper field. The 
entire sociological history of mankind is a prophecy of 
farther specializations of social function with coincident 
reductions of the older institutions. 

Vast as the State is to-day, great as its power is, it is 
nevertheless a secondary and subordinate institution. 

^ "To the public (State) schools goes $225,000,000 annually; to all 
other schools, $40,000,000; to universities of all kinds, $10,000,000 for 
current expenses. We need five times as much." YMot, More Motey for 
the Public Schools. 

* VoXiozV, Science of Politics,^. 125; Bluntschli, Theory of the State, 
pp. 17, 92 et seq. ; Le Rossignol, Orthodox Socialism. 



I 
I 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 45 

Property, Family, and Church, — private wealth, the 
home, and religion, — in the persons of lords, of patri- 
archs, and of priests, conspired to build the State, to 
make its princes and its laws. To this day, in every 
Nation sufficiently civilized to have orderly government. 
Property, Family, and Church manipulate government to 
their own ends.* 

Culture antedates Business by many a century, for it 
began with language and the industrial arts. As a social 
institution, Culture finds its apotheosis in the university; 
but it requires many other modes for its expression. 
The museum, the library, the newspaper, the magazine, 
the book, the picture, the hospital, the factory, and 
the farm are essentially the products of Culture. The 
fine arts, however broadly we may use the term, are 
but exhibits of its power. Man finds in music, poetry, 
painting, architecture, a relief for self-expression, a joy 
of being, a meaning to life, that nothing else can give.^ 

1 Superficially this may not appear true. By franchises and by tariff 
laws, the State puts many men in the way of wealth ; but it does so at 
the dictates of Property. The poUtical power of the millionaire is pro- 
verbial. The monogamous Family is a sacred idea : despite divorce and 
Mormonism, the governments of this Nation and of the States dare 
not, never even consider, legalizing bigamy, polygamy, and polyandry. 
The Family, not the State, invented the civil marriage ; and did so 
because of the weakness of the Church, which could not everywhere 
solemnize the ecclesiastical marriage. Free love, adultery, and prostitu- 
tion endure because the work of the Family in developing the human 
being out of the animal is not yet complete ; atavisms will recur, and 
degeneration as yet continues to accompany civilization. More recon- 
dite, yet not less certain, is the subordination of even the American State 
to the Church. In this New World, religious conflicts have dictated reli- 
gious toleration to save both religion and society. (See Gumplowicz, 
Outlines of Sociology, p. 155, trans, by Moore. Also Chancellor-Hewes, 
The United States^ vol. i, p. 450.) Therefore, the Church itself has com- 
manded, and still commands, the separation of Church and State. At the 
same time, it compels the State to withhold taxation of ecclesiastical pro- 
perty while affording police protection and maintaining title. (Schaff, 
Church and State.) 

2 Henderson, Education and the Larger Life, p. 80. 



46 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

Culture, then, is a reality that gives beauty to morals 
and content to existence. True culture is the solvent 
of the confusions of egoism and altruism. The motive of 
Culture is self-development ; but its beginning is social 
service and its outcome is social usefulness. Culture is 
not synonymous with education, for its speech is of 
amenities and of graces rather than of powers and of 
insights. It is education raised to the second power. 
When culture is founded upon education, it possesses 
dignity ; when education is crowned with culture, it 
possesses charm. 

An economic analysis discovers Culture in its rela- 
tions with Property and with Business. The creations of 
Art become the things of Property through the process 
of exchange, which is the essence of Business. In these 
times, many of us imagine that the farmer raises wheat, 
the miner digs iron, the potter moulds clay, the me- 
chanic builds the machine, the weaver makes cloth, the 
painter creates the picture, the author writes the book, 
the surgeon binds the wound, the lawyer pleads his case, 
that all artists or artisans do their work, in order that 
Business may resound upon the earth. It is a strange, 
unhistoric, unphilosophic delusion. It is the modern 
temporary insanity. Such is the transcendence of Busi- 
ness, the last survival of private war upon earth.* 

Of this temporary unsoundness of the social judg- 
ment, due largely to the unprecedented and marvelous 
augmentation of economic activity, itself the effect of 
political freedom, which in turn is the effect of religious 
freedom,^ the symbol is money, the medium of modern 
exchanges of property, real and personal. We vainly 
imagine that money buys anything and everything ; but 
when we undertake to buy the things and the experiences 

^ Webb, History of Trades -Unionism, p. 78. 

' " Freedom is the heart of commerce." Colbert in Comptes Rendus 
de V Institute xxxix, 93. 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 47 

that are really worth while, this imagining abruptly ends 
in the shock of the discovery that only a few things are 
bought and sold. Of services of man to man, money 
buys but few ; and of these few services, money buys 
almost none that are important. The economic world is 
really much restricted. In many instances, where we 
seem to be buying services we are in fact but merely 
repaying to the servant the cost of the services to him 
in order that he may live by his generous labor. In 
truth, in this modern age, honest services are scarcely 
to be bought at all. Even in the case of goods and of 
lands, by no means all the exchanges are in the way of 
business. Men do not sell household furniture and sup- 
plies to their wives and children. The proposition to 
pay salaries to mothers for the care that they take of 
their own children is but one phase of the modern un- 
soundness of judgment upon most economic matters.^ 
The delusions of Business have made not a few mad.^ 

Culture is to civilization what the intellect is to the 
mind : Religion is the heart of civilization ; Government, 
the will. 

Last and least of the social institutions is Business, 
which reflects the warfare rather than the peace of 
humanity, and tells the story of the past rather than pre- 
dicts the future. It is possible to conceive a civilization 
without war, and without business in its strict economic 
sense. The theory of Business does not comport with 
the fundamental morality of mankind. 

In order to make this theory, as expressed in its vari- 
ous maxims, comport with the tenth commandment of 

1 This proposition has repeatedly appeared in various current period- 
icals for women and the home. Charlotte Oilman, Woman and Eco7tomics. 

2 One of these delusions is that money values are competent mea- 
sures; e. g. that an income of a million dollars a year represents in the 
recipient a thousand times as much worth to the world as an income of 
a thousand dollars a year; and this irrespective of its sources and of its 
expenditure. 



48 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

the Decalogue and with the Golden Rule, it is necessary 
to define many terms and to refine the general opinion 
of many familiar practices. This tenth commandment 
begins, **Thou shalt not covet," and the Golden Rule 
is, ** Do unto others as ye would that they should do 
unto you," while the essential theory of Business is, 
" Get for what you have more than its cost : that is, sell 
at a profit." To " make money " is to get more for less : 
the added "more " is "something for nothing." In the 
history of the world, nearly every fortune has been 
made by gains from others. The established business 
maxims tell the story : " Buy from weak holders : that 
is, from those who must sell." "Buy cheap, sell dear." 
*' Let the buyer beware {Caveat emptor)!' 

Morality, however, is gaining upon business, as it is upon 
warfare. We now generally recognize as usury, and therefore 
immoral as well as illegal, interest above six per cent. The law 
enforces commissions of only five per cent upon sales. The 
man who literally gives nothing and gets something is "ob- 
taining money under false pretenses," and may be liable crim- 
inally. Moreover, Business, like War, is becoming organized, 
ordered, and professionalized. We have put an end to private 
war and to the overt acts of private feud ; and it is quite within 
the limits of possibility that we may bring to an end private 
business and private gain. The corporation is a limitation 
of private enterprise ; it is quite possible that in the future 
corporations, as democratic as the modern churches or the 
modern governments, may control economic life. And it is 
much more likely that this will take place than that the State 
will extend much more broadly than now its illogical and 
unnatural economic functions, which, as should be antici- 
pated, it usually performs so poorly. 

Upon this analysis, it is obvious that the pupil who is 
to understand modern life at as early an age as is appro- 
priate must secure some knowledge of, some insight 
into the meaning of, these great social institutions. But 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 49 

what is the meaning of War ? What knowledge of War 
can be of any possible use even as a stage in the edu- 
cation of a boy or girl, not to say as a feature of en- 
during culture?^ The history of the mechanics of war 
is convincing evidence that war will cease. War is con- 
ditioned by ignorance : only the man who cannot by 
argument convince his enemy desires to slay him. War 
is conditioned by selfishness ; only the man who cannot 
by service get what he desires of his neighbor thinks 
to rob him. The first wars were between families ; the 
next between clans ; the next between communities ; 
then followed wars between tribes, nations, peoples, 
empires. To-day, from San Francisco to Boston there 
is organized and, let us hope, permanent peace. War is 
the true suicide. " He that takes the sword shall perish 
by the sword." ^ The families and children of soldiers 
are few. Thus evil cuts itself down.^ 

1 It may be necessary to set apart a certain number of youths to be 
instructed (not educated) in the theory and tactics of war. It may per- 
haps be desirable as a miUtary precaution to maintain a miUtia and even 
high school and college cadets. There is perhaps some physical train- 
ing in the manual of arms. But war as manslaughter, real war, and the 
spirit of real war are all absolutely anti-educational. 

2 Cf. Jeremiah, Lamentations xv, 2; xlii, 11. 

3 Franklin said, " There never was a good war or a bad peace." 
(Letter to Josiah Quincy, September 11, 1773.) Of course, no war can 
be righteous upon both sides. Even the righteous side is likely soon to 
develop such a pitch of rage as to cease to be righteous in spirit. " Ven- 
geance is mine, I will repay," saith the Lord. Paul, Romans xii, 19, 
referring to Deutero7iomy xxxiii, 35. 

A defensive war may be righteous. No offensive war possibly can be. 
The arguments in defense of the American aggression in the Spanish - 
American War all proceed from the postulate that there was no other 
way to put to an end the atrocities of the Spanish rulers ; whereas, there 
was, in fact, an easy way : purchase of the island of Cuba at any price 
rather than renewal of the lust of blood in Americans. War does not 
become us. We are the first of the true world-peoples. We are what 
the Romans meant to be. But what we gained in pride, we lost in character 
and in reputation when as a nation we asserted that the end justified the 
means. Cf. Plutarch, The Slow Punishme^it 9J the Wicked. 



50 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

To charge war to ignorance is fallacious. To charge 
anything to ignorance is to argue on the theory that 
human nature is a vacuum. Such an argument is built 
on negation, and circles about in nothing. In truth, war 
is conditioned by ignorance of facts and of principles 
because the heart of man is full of desires ; to their ac- 
complishment, he is willing to proceed directly, whereas 
the best way, often the only way, to accomplish them, is 
to proceed indirectly, that is to find a tool ^ or a method.^ 
The thief desires property and steals it, while the honest 
man, desiring it, gives services or goods in exchange for 
it. At the cost of bloodshed, of hatred, and of revitalized 
estrangement, war is always wrong, even when the end 
proposed is good. 

" Thou shalt not kill " is a universal law : not even for 
Church or State may one kill righteously another man, save, 
of course, in defense. Even the killing of a murderer by the 
State in punishment of his crime is no longer to be approved, 
for both Christian ethics and scientific pedagogics show that it 
is possible to redeem the criminal from the sinful conditions 
of his soul. He may be " born again : " educated out of his 
past : so that his sins are literally forgiven, and he will go and 
sin no more.® 

Wars are crimes in the history of nations. The no- 
tions of war in the minds of a civilized people are echoes 
of the past, regurgitations of ancient passions, reverbera- 
tions of ancestral rages, telling of the pit from which we 
were digged. They become effective only when the 
people, from want of intelligence and goodness, despair of 
accomplishing some purpose in righteousness.^ 

^ See Ward, Psychic Factors in Civilization, chapter xxix. 

2 Method = way through, a main traveled road, ;u€Ta bl6%. 

^ Criminals are either sane or insane. The sane are educable and 
therefore redeemable. Criminology and Pedagogy have many points of 
common interest and bearing. The insane may be curable or chronic. 
Their cases are pathological. 

* Longfellow, The Arsenal ; Bloch, The Future of War. 



THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 51 

War as an institution has its schools, its arsenals, its 
factories. It maintains the cult of military drill and of 
naval display. It chants a pseudo-patriotism dangerous 
to the real, which overclouds it, almost suppresses it, 
sometimes makes any patriotism seem callous, absurd, 
and base. 

Property, Family, Church, State, School, and Culture are 
all good, entirely good. But Business and War, though ne- 
cessary until now, and apparently for no little time to come, 
and therefore good as mediate institutions, have many evil 
features and influences. The good institutions should be set 
to the redemption of society from War and from Business by 
cultivating in their practices what is good and by eliminating 
and suppressing what is evil. Whatever is good works for the 
welfare of man and of men ; whatever is evil injures humanity 
itself and all the individuals concerned. 

Business and War have brought together the ends of the 
earth. The merchant and the soldier wove the fabric of Ro- 
man civilization. The Crusades redeemed Europe by giving 
it light from the East. For Europe and America, Business and 
War have rediscovered India, China, and Japan. Let us hope 
that only in appearance do they squander human lives for 
naught. 

*' O yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill." 1 

* Tennyson, In Memoriam. 



CHAPTER III 

CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 

In our country and in our times, no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who 
does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of admin- 
istration. — Mann, Education (lecture iii). 

Therefore, my people are taken into captivity for want of knowledge. —Isaiah v, 13. 

The perfection of human life is our aim. — Pollock, History of the Science of Politics, 



To educate is to educe or to develop ; to instruct is to 
train ; to inculcate is to inform ; while to teach is to 
show, to guide, to impart anything whatever for any 
purpose whatsoever.^ These terms are arranged in an 
order that, according to the strictest logic, displays the 
extent and intent of their content. Educate denotes most, 
teach least ; educate connotes least, teach most. Educate 
has the most intension, teach the most extension. There- 
fore, educate is a word more difficult of definition than 
teach. And, therefore, despite popular notions and prac- 
tices, while even a child may teach, only an expert can 
educate. 

It has frequently been observed that without teaching 
humanity in the course of a single generation would re- 
lapse into savagery and nearly perish in internecine war- 
fare. Civilization is utterly dependent upon teaching.^ 
But is it true that without education humanity would be 
wrecked } Despite the obviousness of the distinction be- 
tween the two hypotheses, many, failing to discriminate 

^ Cf. Palmer, "The Ideal Teacher," /^^/aw/zV Monthly, April, 1907, 
p. 442. 

^ Per contra, Ross, Social Cojttrol, pp. 152, 224. He insists that the 
" moral osmosis " and the " vegetative moral life " assist teaching to 
maintain civilization. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 53 

between teaching and education and between civilization 
and humanity, have confused them. Let us, therefore, 
inquire as to the relation between education and civilized 
humanity. First, then, what is civilization ? and, next, 
what is humanity ? 

Like many other grandiose terms, — like culture, phi- 
losophy, religion, philanthropy, nation, wealth, — the 
term civilization lends itself more readily to description 
than to definition. In popular usage it has several mean- 
ings, none of them clear ; and it may be used properly 
to designate either process or result, either kinesis or 
status. 

Civilization is the evolution of human society. Its me- 
chanical processes may be stated in these terms, — Humanity 
is originally manifested in groups, from whose conflicts and 
unions larger societies are formed. In these societies, the 
weaker and more numerous individuals are reduced to the ser- 
vice of the stronger and fewer, who, thus granted economic 
leisure, develop the political structure and the various arts of 
war and of peace. By the new social relations, the hetero- 
geneous ethnic elements are brought into closer homogeneity 
of kinship and of sympathy and develop a typical and integral 
character. Other conflicts and unions with other groups and 
societies arise. The general society grows externally larger 
and internally more complex and displays in succession aris- 
tocracy, oligarchy, bureaucracy, monarchy, democracy ; and 
bourgeoisie, proletarians, peasants, slaves, various manners of 
classes, of castes and of masses. When too great homogeneity 
of blood-kinship and independence from other societies have 
continued for decades, conspiring to separate too far the 
nobles and the commons, the rich and the poor, the free and 
the unfree, the society disintegrates in revolution. The his- 
tory of a particular civilization ends always either in its sub- 
jection to another civilization or in cataclysm.^ 

The spirit of true civilization has been expressed in 
these terms: — 

^ Gumplowicz, Outlines of Sociology, part iii, translated by Moore. 



54 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

"Civilization is ... a complicated outcome of a war 
waged with Nature by man in Society to prevent her from 
putting into execution in his case her law of Natural Selec- 
tion. . . . The measure of success attending the struggle of 
each band or association [of men] so engaged is the measure 
of the civilization attained." ^ 

Civilization is progress, said Guizot. The contrary of the 
qualities and conditions of the savage life is civilization, said 
J. S. Mill.=^ 

Our notions of civilization necessarily depend upon the 
observed facts of our own national life and of the lives 
of other nations, our cross-sections of humanity, as now 
manifested in various parts of the world, compared and 
contrasted with the recorded and considered facts of the 
lives of earlier nations.^ But whatever these notions may 
be, they will concern truth, art, and morality ; our visions 
of reality, of beauty, and of goodness ; our development 
in intelligence, in appreciation, and in honor. And what- 
ever these notions be, they will all be essentially social ; 
for they will be derived from our fellow men and in com- 
mon with our fellow men from the records and traditions 
of our ancestors. Now and then may appear among us 
one who to a degree is original in that he possesses some 
new individual knowledge ; but most of this original, new 
knowledge will be new and original in appearance only, 
for upon examination it will be mere synthesis of what 
many others know. 

The quality of a civilization is to be valued in accord- 
ance with its morality, while its culture is the measure of 

^ Mitchell, The Past in the Present : What is Civilization? p. 189. 

^ Cf. Y^xdidi^ Law of Civilization and Decay ; T)\2l-^^x, Intellectual Devel- 
opment of Europe. If civilization is not cyclical and does not include 
retrogression as well as progression, the title and thesis of Gibbon, " De- 
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire," must be considered either illogical 
or unhistorical. 

3 Acton, Study of History, pp. 12-16; Seeley, Lectures and Essays, 
p. 306. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 55 

its efficiency. Hence arise the two questions whether 
there is a morality transcending nations or ages ^ and 
whether diffusion of culture or its particular height is the 
true test. These large philosophical questions concern 
the educator : Shall he teach social, popular, historical, 
national, comparative, or ideal morals ? Shall he aspire 
to educate as many as possible to the average best pos- 
sible degree, or a few to their particular best possible 
degrees ? According to his answers to these questions, 
he will mould the life of his people.^ 

Social (group) morals differ with the particular class in the 
community. The lord believes in honor, in self-reliance, in 
bravery, in frankness, in patriotism, in independence : he is 
masterful.* The commoner believes in honesty, in service, in 
fortitude, in silence, in sympathy, in modesty ; he is dutiful.^ 
The educator who proposes to teach social morality will teach 
the morality learned in his own youth, — a morality predeter- 
mined by the social (economic) position of his parents, in 
the degree permitted by the social conditions of the parents 
of his pupils. 

Popular morals are broader and deeper than social (group) 
morals. They differ less from section to section and from 
generation to generation than do social morals in their smaller 
and shallower diffusion. They manifest the influences that 
go to the making of all averages. To particularize : Popular 
morals depend upon kinds and forces of the various classes, 
cultures, communities, races, religions, and languages in- 
volved. The educator who proposes to teach popular morality 
will teach the norm of the morality of the various persons 
and communities known or reported to him. 

Historical morals go far deeper. They speak the truth of 
the progress of mankind. They sound the natural law. 

^ Acton, Study of History, pp. 64-73. 

2 Hadley, Education of the American Citizen, p. 180. 

3 Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, iv, 78, on the high-minded man. 

* This contrast is now a commonplace. Nietzsche, Genealogy of 
Morals ; Ruskin, Munera Pulveris, Fors Clavigera ; Lecky, Histoyy of 
European Morals ; all passim. 



56 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

National morals are stable for long periods, though subject 
to revolutionary change. Their aspirations are sincere. 

Morals are in part traditional, and in part comparative. 
In their traditional aspect, they are habits, duties, customs ; in 
their comparative aspect, fashions, modes.^ 

Comparative morals are as deep as history and as v^ide 
as the nations : they, and they alone, are absolutely true 
to our universal human nature, for in the present they 
include the best of the past. Jesus Christ summarized 
them : "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and 
with all thy strength; and ... thy neighbor as thy- 
self." 2 

. . . 'AfATri^CEIC (welcome as a household guest) KY- 
PION TON 0E6N coy 'El "0AH3^KAPAIAC COY (out of 
thy whole heart) KAJ 'E| "OAHC THC M^YXHC COY (out of 
thy whole soul) KAI 'EI^'OAHC THC AIAN6IA3 COY (out 
of thy whole thorough-mind, discernment, intention) KAI 'E| 
"OAHC TH3 ICXYOC COY (and out of thy whole bodily 
strength). . . . 'AFATTHCEIC (welcome, love, dwell with) 
T6N TTAHCiON COY (thy near man) 'COC CEAYTON (thy 
very self). The power and beauty of the Greek text do not fully 
appear in the English translation. " Love " means the love 
expressed by a noble host toward an honored guest whom he 
welcomes into his own home. (Compare ayaOo?.) The tremen- 
dous emphasis appears in the exposition, — heart, soul, mind, 
strength, — and particularly in the word " mind," which means 
perfect insight and unlimited purpose. (For neighbor, com- 
pare the definition of the neighbor in the parable of the Good 
Samaritan.^) The word ivToXrf, command, is likewise emphatic, 
meaning " finality." For the whole passage, compare " Jesus 
. . . said . . . , ' If a man love me, he will keep my words : 

^ Ross, Socm/ Control, pp. 180-195. CL Baldwin, Mental jDevelopmenf: 
Social and Ethical Interpretations, chapter I, viii-x. 

2 Mark, Gospel xii, 30, 31. Greek text of Westcott and Hort: Schaff, 
editor. 

3 Luke, Gospel x, 29-37. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION S7 

and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him 
and make our abode with him.' " ^ Literally : If any one 
welcomes (and honors) me, he will guard my plan (logic), and 
my father will welcome him, and we will (freely) go to him, 
and we will make a home (staying) with him. This plan of 
Jesus was invariably to do for others. Toward all, we are to 
be like God, who " giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth 
not." ^ " It is more blessed to give than to receive." ^ From 
this single principle, every other doctrine of Jesus follows. 
It is the neighbor-religion, ridiculed by Schopenhauer, Von 
Hartmann, and Nietzsche ; and rejected by every civilization 
to this date : and yet building every civilization ; and destroy- 
ing it finally.'* 

" Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then, 
On the bodies and souls of living men ? 
And think ye that building shall endure, 
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?"^ 

Ideal morality may seem the proper teaching for the 
educator. Kant often spoke with enthusiasm of " the moral 
law within." " The still, small voice of conscience " is a famil- 
iar phrase : nor is conscience to be lightly challenged as a 
reality of personal experience. But whether conscience is a 
revelation of new truth, original with the soul that hears it, 
or an echo, a sifting, a refining of the notions of general 
human society is a question. New truth does come into the 

^ John, Gospel xiv, 23. 

2 James, Epistle i, 5. 

3 Luke, Acts xx, 35. A saying of Jesus', quoted by Paul. 

* " The suffering of an advanced society is not that of one struggling 
for subsistence, or in combat with enemies, but of one in the throes 
of disease." ..." The civilization natural to our age is conspicuously 
retarded by ignorance, disease, crime, poverty, and other disagreeable 
anachronisms." Charlotte Oilman, Human Work, pp. 10, 7. 

The famiUar " Golden Rule " is not half of the above-quoted " Eleventh 
and Twelfth Commandments." It is a prescription that one about to act 
should consider the sufferer. Its converse, Do not do unto others what you 
would not have them do to you, is negative and inhibitory for the actor. 

The " New Commandments " universalize the Golden Rule and thereby 
immeasurably elevate and dignify its principle. 

5 Lowell, A Parable. 



S8 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

world via individual men. In the souls of such exceptional 
men, conscience, morality, duty, responsibility, rise to new 
heights, but even in them common morality is the substruc- 
ture and the main structure, the new truth only the super- 
structure, of their moral system.^ Moreover, once expressed 
by them in act or in thought, their higher morality is no 
longer ideal but real, and is added to the sum of comparative 
morals. " E pur si muove," said Galileo ; and lived and died 
to prove what he said. Even morality advances.^ We know 
the road but cannot see the goal.^ 

The term morals forthshadows its true meaning. 
Morals are customs ; but customs are not necessarily 
morals.* Morals are almost synonymous w^ith ethics. 

The shades of difference appear in the roots of the two 
words morals {mos, custom, manner, mode, cf. maneo, remain) 
and ethics {Wo^, custom, will, cf. c^cA-w, desire ; ^eos, god [free 
in act] ; and c^vos, race, peoples, caste). Morals are the ex- 
ternal habits and manners ; the modes of action ; the objec- 
tive customs ; the clothes of the individual and of society. "^ 
Ethics are the habits of thought, of will, and of desire ; the 
subjective customs ; the forms and modes that express the 
character ; the language, the force, the grace of the individual 
and of society. A moral quality may always be measured ; an 
ethical may only be inferred ; one lies upon the surface, the 
other below it. 

*' In the beginning is the act." " 

The act evidences the motive and discloses more or less of 
the ethical character of the actor. The judgment of the act 

* " To know that the greatest men of earth are men who think as I do, 
but deeper, and see the real as I do, but clearer, who work to the goal 
that I do, but faster, and serve humanity as I do, but better, — that is an 
inspiration to my life." Baldwin, Mental Development, vol. ii, chapter, 
" The Genius," p. i68. 

2 Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. 

3 Hoffding, Problems of Philosophy, p. i86. 

* Socrates died to prove this. Crito ; Phcedo. 
5 Cf. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. 

® Goethe, Faust, part i, sc. iii. Such is the first axiom of the modem 
pragmatic philosophy. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 59 

is an ethical judgment ; but the language in which that judg- 
ment is expressed conveys a moral decision. An act may be 
in accordance with the morals of the times and yet be essen- 
tially immoral ; or it may offend the common morals and yet 
be essentially moral. But no ethically correct action, no right- 
eousness, ever offends customary or historical or national or 
comparative ethics ; because by definition ethics is in con- 
formity with reason, and, by definition again, reason is uni- 
versal, uniform, and increasingly certain. Ethics, then, is a 
single term conveying the meaning of the phrase, '* ideal 
morality." ^ 

In appearance, there is here a paradox ; or rather, here is 
a paradox in the original meaning of the term, a proposition 
that appears false until it has been adequately considered. 
Humanity requires a term to satisfy its need of finality, the 
Kantian category of absolute obligation. Ethics is such a 
term, a metaphysical abstraction that enspheres, illuminates, 
and organizes the kinds and modes of duty.^ 

The entire structure of a particular civilization de- 
pends upon its morality. This is its character. So the 

^ " Duty is to our humanity what gravitation is to the physical uni- 
verse. " Martineau, Ethics and Religion^ p. 302. 

" The situation that has not Ideal, its Duty, was never yet occupied 
by man." Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, book ii, chapter ix. 

" Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong." 

Wordsworth, Ode to Duty. 

2 Watson, Philosophy of Kant {extracts). " Nothing in all the world, 
or even outside the world, can possibly be regarded as limitlessly good 
except z. good will" (p, 225). This goodwill enforces "the obUgation to 
act from pure reverence of the moral law," irrespective of consequences. 
" Reason issues its commands inflexibly, refusing to promise anything 
to the natural desires" (p. 231) and despising their claims. " There is 
but one categorical imperative : Act according to that maxim, and that 
only, which you can will at that time to be a universal law" (p. 241). 
Or, " act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through 
your will a universal law of Nature." Such is rationalized morality. 
" Act so that the will may regard itself as in its maxims laying down 
universal laws " (p. 249). Such a categorical imperative necessitates 
each man's conceiving himself as an end in himself, which upon re- 
flection means conceiving himself as free and a lawgiver to himself. 



6o EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

entire structure of a particular person depends upon his 
morality, which is his character. And since it is the 
purpose of education to develop character, obviously this 
can be accompHshed only by training in the morality of 
civilization as manifested in the morality of the best 
persons.^ 

Here we come upon the essential problem of educa- 
tion. And we must solve it in the light of certain axioms, 
self-evident or agreed truths. Unless there are such 
truths, there cannot possibly be any science of educa- 
tion or any need for an art of education ; for otherwise 
education must appear to be a matter of a series of for- 
tunate accidents, within and without the individual, an 
occasional, sporadic, unintended, unnecessary, unintel- 
ligible procession of facts, which no amount of desire, 
will, and intelligence can secure with certainty. The 
common sense of mankind says, Not so. But has our 
common sense erred .■* 

Many persons deny that education is ever consciously 
accomplished or achieved. According to their notion, which 
they often express both in speech and in action, educated in- 
telligence exists only where the intelligence would have been 
equally great without education. All increase in ability ac- 
companying or following courses of education is but the in- 
crease natural to the person. At most, educational courses 
but sift the smart and label them to their social advantage ; 
yet the courses are in no wise to be credited with the result. 

This is our crux difficultatis. Is there a law of 
growth } 

Our problem is. Can reason effect education } If it 
can, then let us seriously undertake the task of universal 
education ; if it cannot, let us give up our futile general 
experiments, allowing individuals, when they so desire, 
to waste their time, their wealth, and their energy for 

^ " Men of character are the conscience of the society to which /they 
belong." Emerson, Character. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION • 6i 

affection's sake upon their own, but no longer squander- 
ing the common treasure. 

This is no idle matter. All about us, for hundreds of gen- 
erations, the long-schooled — the university-cultivated men — 
have in most instances not manifested the character of the 
educated. " So with the man who has daily inured himself to 
habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self- 
denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower 
when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow mor- 
tals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." ^ Certain minori- 
ties — one, two, three, five, to be very generous, perhaps ten in 
a hundred — of the schooled and graduated men and women 
have been well educated ; but most have developed in moral 
character, the final test, no more than they would have de- 
veloped in the haphazard environment of life out of school 
and college. 

How many years ago the animal destined for human- 
ity developed its last physical feature, the hand,^ no one 
knows. Until the human hand was completely developed, 
the brain was not finished.^ Until then the education of 
man beyond the animal was proceeding physiologically 
as well as psychologically. But when the hand, with its 
four fingers and its opposing thumb, with its muscular' 
palm and sensitive finger-tips, had been finished, the ani- 
mal in man had been perfectly wrought out. Whatever 
cells and tissues, whatever blood and lymph currents, 
whatever organs and systems of organs, whatever gen- 
eral and special senses could accomplish in building and 
furnishing a temple for a soul, had been accomplished. 

The origin of man is, as every one knows, lost in obscurity. 
Several facts of much anthropological interest are hidden from 
the knowledge of man, — the future ; the cause of sex ; the 

^ James, Talks on Psychology and Life's Ideals, p. 76. 

2 Drummond, Ascent of Man, pp. lOO et seq. 

3 MacDougall, " Significance of the Human Hand in the Evolution 
of M.md" Jou7'nal of Psychology, April, 1905. 



62 . EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

origin of life ; the links connecting man and his progenitors, 
the anthropoids and subanthropoids ; the stages by which the 
sea-animal became a land animal quadruped, then a tree ani- 
mal (when the hand evolved), and last a land animal biped ; ^ 
and the region of the origin of man, wherein God breathed 
into him the breath of life, and he became a living soul.^ 

Whether in forty or fifty or a hundred thousand 
years, man has grown taller, heavier, and stronger, 
or the contrary, does not affect the question of his edu- 
cability, for between height, weight, and strength, 
whether of animals or of men, no relation of intelligence 
and character has ever been established.^ Elephants, 
horses, and dogs are rival claimants for intellectual 
supremacy among the beasts, and parrots, crows, and 
canaries among the fowls. Kant was five feet in height. 
Napoleon five feet four inches, Emerson five feet eight, 
Gladstone five feet ten, Webster the same, Bismarck six 
feet one inch, Washington six feet three, and Lincoln 
six feet four inches. Little and big, sick and well, weak 
and strong, indifferently are good and bad, capable and 
dull. Even the nervous speed, the psychological rate, 
makes but slight difference. The quick and the slow 
indifferently are educable or not educable. Sex matters 
little or nothing.'* Race is of but slight importance. 
Between Alexander and Napoleon, Dewey and Togo, 
Confucius and Buddha, Dante and Goethe, Tolstoi and 
Hawthorne, Socrates and Emerson, Aristotle and Kant, 
Grant and Oyama, Sophocles and Shakespeare, there 
is not much to choose. The ages have displayed no 
determinable advance. Sargon, Caesar, Charlemagne, 
have no modern superiors. David, the author of Job, 

^ Tyler, Whence and Whither of Man ; Darwin, Descent of Man ; 
Drummond, Ascent of Mati ; Hall, Heirs of the Ages ; Hall, Adolescence: 
its Psychology ; YAdd, Social Evolution : zXX passim. 

^ Genesis ii, 7. 

3 Donaldson, Growth of the Brain., p. 174. 

* Thompson, The Mental Traits of Sex, chapter ix. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 63 

Homer, ^schylus, Thucydides, Virgil, Paul, Plato, 
Ovid, Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, St. Augustine, Luther, 
Tennyson, Lowell, Thackeray, Marian Evans, Victor 
Hugo, display no gradual improvement in the mind of 
man. If the good inherit personal immortality in a local- 
ized heaven, the ancients will doubtless be found the 
peers of the moderns,^ whether the race lasts a hundred 
thousand or a hundred million years. 

Whatever be the metaphysics of the individual, this 
opinion of physiology that man as a physical animal 
is no longer improving is likely to be acceptable. From 
Abraham till now, we are all fellow men. The soul of the 
modern harmonizes with the soul of the ancient : all of 
us have sought and are now seeking the same goal. 
Life is a school, the same kind of a school since the 
walls of Thebes first rose. Human educability is the 
same now as in the days of Tiglath-pileser. 

Is there any difference between men and nations 
of the different ages ? Undoubtedly there is ; and, of 
course, this difference is in knowledge. With not one 
new cerebral cell or spinal ganglion, man the individual 
is the same educable creature as in the days of Moses ; 
but man the race knows more.^ How much more that 
it is really worth while to know, how much more truth, 
let no man undertake to say. The stones that bore the 
commands given in the thunder of Sinai recorded truth 
to which the race has not yet risen. No civilization 
as yet has fairly represented the results of faithful 
observance of the Ten Commandments. No civilization 
yet has attempted to express the meaning of the Tenth. 
We do, indeed, know more than any other people ever 
knew; and yet it may be that the race has forgotten 
many things. There are reasons to believe that a vast 
deal of knowledge perished with the Egyptians, with the 

^ Duruy (Grosvener, transl.), Ancie^tt History of the East, p. 25. 
^ Charlotte Gilman, Human Work, chapter iii. 



64 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

Chaldeans, with the Greeks, with the Romans, with the 
Arabs, with the Venetians, with the Moors. And yet no 
serious man would challenge the proposition that Ger- 
many, France, England, America, or Japan, knows more 
than any earlier nation, not excepting Greece "in her 
glory's prime." Not only do we know more, but much of 
our knowledge is now set in order, in systems, in sciences. 
This orderly knowledge is the key to education. It is, 
in truth, a partial discovery of the logos (Aoyos) without 
which was not anything made that was made.^ 

" The belief that the course of events and the agency of 
man are subject to the laws of a divine order, which it is alike 
impossible for any one either fully to comprehend or effectu- 
ally to resist — this belief is the ground of all our hope for the 
future destinies of mankind." ^ 

In a certain sense, it is the race rather than the indi- 
vidual that has been educated, for the individual of these 
later times inherits the results of the experiences of the 
individuals of the past. The total of these experiences 
is the racial culture, expressed partly in laws, customs, 
institutions, habits, and notions, and partly in ideals and 
standards not reducible to words or forms or habits, 
which we may call the human spirit or wisdom. That 

^ itivTO. ZC avrov iyevero, Koi x«P^s outoC iyevero ouSe eV. Literally, 
all things came to be through {vm) this (\6yos, thought), and without this 
no [existing ] thing came to be. h yeyovev ev avTCf ^«^ [^v] , koL r} (cot] ^v rh 
<l>u)5 Tuv avQpdiiruv. What began in this was life, and the life was the light 
of (the) men. John, Gospel i, 3, 4. 

This passage is truly Platonic. It glorifies the Idea (tSea), of which the 
human mind {vovs) is but a form. Plato, Phcedo, 96; Timceus^ 51; 
Philebus, 54 ; Sophist, 256; ThecEtetus, 184, 186, and many other passages. 

The teaching is that the Reason (God) created the cosmos, and that 
His light forever shines in every individual man in the cosmos. These 
" own " of the Reason, His " idiots," do not understand Him. But 
such as do understand Him (in so far as they understand) become His 
offspring not from the flesh or their own desire but from God (e/c fleoO, 
from the Vision, SeeJs, of the Light, ipm, sent by the Reason, \6yoi). 

2 Thirlwall, Remains, iii, 282. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 6$ 

the race has been educated, and that individuals partake, 
some largely, some but little, some scarcely at all, in 
this racial education is the common belief: if it be but 
illusion, then humanity is insane, too insane to recognize 
in any degree its essential madness. 

The relations of the individual to the racial culture 
are two ; discrete, independent, necessary. One relation 
is that of the bondman, the other that of the heir. Birth 
brings with it conditions of environment, conditions filial, 
ecclesiastical, political, physical, economic, from which 
escape is absolutely, at least for all practical purposes, 
impossible. In this relation, one's education is more 
than compulsory, it is inevitable. So inevitable is it that 
we speak generally of it as "rearing" or "breeding" 
or "parentage." We often forget that for a child of 
good parents to become good is a matter not of nature 
but of education ; so also with regard to the aristocrat, 
the healthy, the rich. The truth of this we recognize at 
once by postulating the opposite : imagine a child born 
of poor, sickly, outlawed, sinful, unkind parents, who cast 
him out as a foundling, and adopted by sensible foster- 
parents, entirely opposite in character and station. By 
common consent, these new parents have before them a 
work of education. The child has escaped from one bond- 
age to another. He has changed one fate for another. 
Even the Gospel, which fulfills the Law, is a schooling.^ 

The other relation is that of heir. This is obviously, 
apparently, openly, a relation of education. The heir 
inherits all, but, of course, can really possess only that 
which he understands, appreciates, and uses. In these 
times, one's property may far exceed his possessions ; 
this is no less true of culture than of wealth. The bond- 
age of the environment compels adjustment to facts ; 

* "The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ." Paul, 
Galatians iii, 24. Literally, the law (the culture from the past) became 
our pedagogue unto Christ. Also Matthew, Gospel v, 17, 18. 



66 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

this is the natural or necessary or inevitable education ; 
but the heritage merely offers opportunities, and what- 
ever education may result is voluntary. As certainly as 
the heir of the millionaire may renounce his inheritance 
of wealth or waste it, so certainly may the heir of the 
scholar refuse or ignore his inheritance of knowledge. 
And we are all heirs : of wealth, in public buildings, 
parks, roads ; of knowledge, in books, arts, minds.^ 

Every inheritance is conditioned by the ability to 
enter in. The lazy, stupid heir to a fortune is no less 
and no more subject to this condition than is the lazy, 
stupid heir to knowledge and to art. 

It has sometimes been said that while one may or may not 
be an heir to wealth, every one is an heir to the culture of 
the ages. This is a careless but dangerous fallacy. The boy 
of quick and retentive mind is a possible heir to the world's 
knowledge ; but he cannot qualify unless given health, time, 
and opportunity. He must have either parents or guardians 
able and willing to support him in study, and also school, 
library, and laboratory in which to study. Moreover, he must 
have surplus energy for study. 

There is a feature of the physical and the psychical inher- 
itance to which education must give greater consideration. 
There is a catharsis due to satiety of experience in parents 
that forefends children from repeating their lives or powers. 
In the child of the skillful manual laborer, motivation func- 
tions not in bodily technique, but in spiritual activity. The 
ancestors live in their descendant a new mode of existence. 
The energy of the soul functions differently. Here demo- 
cracy, denying class and caste, denying " like father like son," 
asserting the value of " fallow ground " and the necessity of 
opportunity, is true at once to the biologic law of variability 
and the physiological law of cross-functioning in heredity.^ 
Parents acquire qualities for their children to use. It is a 
psychological exposition of the Second Commandment. 

^ Butler, Meaning of Education, pp. 17-31. 

^ Patten, Heredity and Social Progress, chapter iii. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION ^^ 

With every item of inheritance actually possessed, util- 
ized, assimilated, change takes place in the soul of the 
heir. Most of the changes may be slight, too slight for 
observation, but the sum of the changes, their direction, 
their influence, and the nature of the series are unmis- 
takable. 

Even adult men are educable and often educated by new 
heritage. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of the 
poor person gradually or suddenly acquiring or receiving 
riches. Proceeding from two to three dollars a day; from 
nothing in the bank to a thousand dollars saved ; from pov- 
erty to affluence ; from homelessness to family and land ; 
from subjection and irresponsibility to power and obligation ; 
from ignorance to some knowledge ; from little knowledge 
to great; from awkwardness to skill; from fault and folly 
to virtue and judgment : whatever be the stages of progress, 
each new stage in change is invariably accompanied by 
change in the soul. The person who is just the same as before 
is unknown and inconceivable. The science of human nature 
is so far advanced that from every change we expect what 
we call a " result." ^ We expect the man grown famous 
to be increased in self-confidence, and the man grown rich 
to be increased in authoritativeness. We have, in fact, a 
complete catalogue of labels ready for the inventory of the 
effects of change : conceit, egotism, breadth, pride, arrogance, 
generosity, etc. Some results we call good, others bad ; but 
all of them we recognize as familiar evidences of education. 

Unfortunately, these changes do not always lead in 
the direction commended by society. We speak, there- 
fore, of being "well " or ''badly " educated ; and, in gen- 
eral, we agree that to be well educated is to be educated 

^ Royce, Outlines of Psychology, p. 375. His classification of mental 
phenomena under the three heads of sensitiveness, docility, and initia- 
tive ; that of Tarde, Social Laws, under the heads of repetition, opposition, 
and adaptation ; and that in this text, intelligence, efficiency, and moral- 
ity; should display the modes of psychology, of sociology, and of edu- 
cation in dealing with the same phenomena. 



68 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

in such a manner as to repeat the qualities of the best 
of times past and present or to anticipate the qualities 
that the faith of common humanity presents as certain 
to characterize the society of the future, while to be 
badly educated is to manifest the qualities of the worst, 
or to resurrect the qualities that the verdict of common 
humanity condemned and thereby destroyed in the 
society of the past. Once all men were thieves : in our 
loose speech, we allow ourselves to say that a youth may 
now be educated into the thief. Chastity has become a 
female virtue ; and will yet become the common virtue 
of men : a youth may now be educated in that virtue. 

So constituted is the human mind, however, that 
almost always we think of the good rather than of the 
bad kind of anything that has more than one kind. 
"This was a man," said Shakespeare.^ "Take him for 
all in all, we shall not look upon his like again." The 
poet meant, and we recognize, a good man. So when we 
speak of education, by common usage and acceptance, 
we mean the good education. Similarly, civilization has 
its good and its evil meanings. If the "city is civiliza- 
tion," a common adage, the profit thereof may indeed 
be challenged as to whether it offsets the loss to man- 
kind. There is a good civilization ; and there is a bad. 
Marcus Aurelius could no more save Roman civilization 
than Lot could save Sodom. And yet, though both good 
and bad civilizations were and are realities, when we 
speak of civilization, we mean that which is good.^ 

If it be asked, how civilization in seeking to protect the 
unfit from the operation of natural law can be evil, we 
must reply sadly that many of the unfit are morally unfit; 
whom civilization perforce keeps alive. Of this, the cured 
and unrepentant victims of the social evil are conspicuous 

* Julius CfBsaTn, act v. 

2 This is in obedience to the familiar social law of optimism. Cf. 
Ross, Social Control, pp. 154-55. 



CIVILIZATION AND EDUCATION 69 

examples. The very triumphs of medicine and of surgery 
often restore to their deadly work in society those whose 
mission is the injury of mankind. 

The education that is good conspires with the civiliza- 
tion that is good to redeem man from his past, from the 
v^rorld, from himself, for the future, for the larger life, 
for the infinite heart v^rhence man came.^ 

^ Drummond, Ascent of Man, p. 56. 



CHAPTER IV 

PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE 

'T is not in mortals to command success, 

But we '11 do more, Sempronius ; we '11 deserve it. 

Addison, Cato, I, ii. 

The anguish of the lost ones of this world is not fear of punishment. It was and is 
the misery of having quenched a light brighter than the sun ; the intolerable sense of 
being sunk ; the remorse of knowing that they were not what they might have been. — 
Robertson, Sertnons, Luke x. 

For my part, I sympathize sincerely with all failures, with the victims of society, with 
those who have fallen, with the imprisoned, with the hopeless, with those who have been 
stained by verdicts of guilty, and with those who, in the moment of passion, have destroyed, 
as with a blow, the future of their own lives. — Ingersoll, Crime against Criminals. 

The purpose of systematic education is to develop a suc- 
cessful life. But what is a successful life .-* What is suc- 
cess } To secure or to endure systematic education is so 
far to be successful; and yet the thoroughly educated 
are not always successful in life. The school is not life, 
as commonly understood, but preparation for life.^ 

What proportion of human beings are successful ? 
The answer is entirely a matter of standards and of defi- 
nitions. It may be profitable to inquire briefly into the 
subject. 

The Arabians said, ''Call no man successful until his 
death." The same thought may be found in the Egyp- 
tian Book of the Dead? Even then the verdict may be 
premature. In truth, it is not for man, in any serious 
sense, to pass upon this matter. "Judge not, that ye be 
not judged"^ applies to this as well as to every other 

^ Life, cf. Leib, body, implies fullness of life, adult life, maturity, the 
pragmatic stage, action. Rosenkranz, Science of Edtication, passim. 
The school is not life, but leisure. 

2 Myers, The Oldest Book in the World, p. loi. 

3 Jesus, quoted by Matthew, Gospel^ chapter vii, i. 



PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE 71 

aspect of our relations to our fellow men. " Do not judge 
by appearances," at any rate, as the proverb says. Nei- 
ther judge by the general verdict. Reputation has no 
dependable relation to success, or to character, or to fact 
A Roman poet,^ two thousand years ago, exposed the 
valuelessness of rumor. 

Success is not always a matter ,of the entire life. The 
greatness of Gladstone was not of single acts or of a 
single epoch ; he grew with the years ; only old age 
could limit his ever-increasing usefulness. Not so with 
that abler and perhaps also more important contempo- 
rary, Bismarck, who outlived his own historical self. 
Napoleon, who in all the annals of mankind yields place 
only to Caesar, saw Waterloo after Austerlitz, and dis- 
played at St. Helena the petty weaknesses of human 
nature. The Roman, whose greatness in action is in- 
comprehensible, was perhaps fortunate in his death. 

Some of the great drew upon " the two worlds " of truth 
and of falsity, of fact and of fiction, of love and of hate, in 
order to win. Of course, they doubled thereby their present 
resources, for the liar, the visionary, and the murderer escape 
the limitations of the truth-speaker, the man of fact, and the 
lover of his kind. Of them, history, as its ethical standards 
rise, is constantly revising its verdict.^ 

Success is not always a matter of general accomplish- 
ment. Washington, who is revered by us perhaps beyond 
any other man excepting Lincoln, was successful alike 
as a soldier, as a legislator, as an executive, and as a 
man of affairs. Not so with Daniel Webster, who had 
but one surpassing power, the persuasion of men to 
high thinking in the State. So Luther excelled only in 
the construction of a new Church. Dante, Cromwell, 
Kant, Marian Evans, were all comparatively narrow. 
But few may, like Alexander, reconstruct a world. 

^ Ovid, Metamorphoses, book iii. 

2 Lea, " Ethical Values," American Historical Review, January, 1904. 



72 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

Success is not always a matter involving conformity 
in all particulars to the personal morality of the times. 
The plain people have been extremely lenient with those 
able to render large social service. There is perhaps 
something in the wear and tear of body and of soul in 
great affairs, that weakens and distresses the great man 
in his personal relations. Abraham, Solomon, Pericles, 
Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Franklin, rendered their 
services to mankind, and passed on, forgiven.^ 

We number among the great some of the sinners 
and the criminals of their countries and ages. Many a 
prophet might have gone to his king with that awful, 
righteous, and final sentence, " Thou art the man." ^ 
Knowing as we do that sometimes the poisoner, the mur- 
derer, the adulterer, the drunkard, the thief, the forger, 
the liar, the traitor, the miser, the slayer of nations, the 
debaucher of peoples, has not failed of success, educators 
must face many an embarrassment. 

Success is not always a matter of recognition at the 
time. What Greek dreamed that Aristotle would rule 
the intellectual world for two thousand years ? ^ To his 
own generation, Shakespeare was only a good business 
man. Perhaps he scarcely suspected more himself. We, 
not his contemporaries, have made the fame of Galileo, 
^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides loomed large in 
their own day, in their own little city ; Michael Angelo 
and Raphael were the great artists of their times ; all 
Frenchmen knew Voltaire and Victor Hugo ; but in their 
own lifetimes, Keats, Poe, and Whitman had only small 

1 Many " true " biographies (i. e. those which expose the weaknesses, 
the errors, even the vices, of great men) are often really false because 
the perspective of values is false. To forgive is not to ignore ; and to 
ignore is not to condone. 

2 2 Samuel xii, 7. The rebuke of David by Nathan. 

^ There are certain signs of an Aristotelian " revival." Cf. Pollock, 
History of the Science of Politics. Turner, History of Philosophy. Aristotle 
w-as never confused as to the nature of success. 



PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE 73 

audiences compared with those after their bones rested 
in the grave. 

And success is seldom evidenced by accumulations of 
property. Who cares whether Copernicus or Columbus 
left fortunes ? Croesus made Caesar, and Maecenas made 
Virgil, so they say; and therefore we remember Croesus 
and Maecenas. Jesus had not " where to lay His head." ^ 

It is possible to defy one's age and to be remembered 
as its peculiar glory. Socrates drank the hemlock as 
ordered by Athens; and John Brown died upon the 
scaffold of the State of Virginia. Will their names ever 
perish ? It is not even necessary to be either right or 
successful. Robert E. Lee was wrong in war and failed 
to win ; and yet we love him and count him among the 
great. Shelley was wrong in his morals, and often in his 
moral teaching, as was Byron also ; yet who will deny 
either his fame or his success ? 

I have written of the greatest of mankind. Each 
conveys some lesson, whether the individual be Homer, 
Buddha, Confucius, Moses, ^sop, Paul, Caesar, Augustus, 
Attila, Charlemagne, Elizabeth, Louis Fourteenth, Crom- 
well, Peter, Catherine Second, Frederick, Jefferson, 
Thackeray, Scott, Emerson. 

I might write of lesser persons, such as we meet 
every day. We know, as a matter of common sense we 
must know, that deathless fame among men is by no 
means proof of real success. The " monuments " of the 
Nile Valley and of Mesopotamia record the names of 
few save the kings. Many of these kings were almost 
total failures. The immortal Cleopatra was a failure. 
Beyond peradventure of doubt, thousands on thousands 
of Egyptians and of Mesopotamians lived successful 
lives. Who believes that the only record is that of 
earth .? Only he who, believing this, believes also that 
life is not worth while, though a success. No educator 

1 Matthew viii, 20. A saying of Jesus'. 



74 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

can sincerely deny the possibility at least of some other 
record, for to deny some other existence, some other 
fame, is to deny the substantial value of education.^ 

Education is not an end in itself. Life, however, is 
such an end ; life, not living merely. Life is an end in 
itself, because life has no conceivable end.^ To con- 
tribute to the fullness of life is the end of education, 
which has limits only in its own methods and in the 
educability of the individual. When education has done 
all that is possible to itself, it necessarily terminates in 
its own end, which therefore must be considered as 
mediate to life. Obviously, therefore, true success, which 
is the only kind of success to be regarded by the edu- 
cator, is largeness of life, which of necessity is a notion 
varying with all varieties of individuals. ^ And yet the 
thoughtful must recognize that to live narrowly, to live 
for the day, to live unrelated to the great institutions 
and forces of society and to one's individual fellow men, 
is to live but in part and not vigorously. The difficulty 
of the social philosopher is to devise a system of educa- 
tion that arouses and organizes activity in insight and 
outlook, and thereby produces the thoughtful. 

For, in real life, most persons are not thoughtful, and 
therefore are not essentially successful. When from 
among those reputed successful, we have eliminated the 
many who have gone upward from below to notoriety 
without worth and to power without value to themselves 
or to other men, the remainder is very small. Is it, then, 
true that all of those of no repute and of those reputed 
to be unsuccessful are really failures .'' Of course not ; 
but the presumption is against them. We are dealing 
here with a matter of much subtlety. Dante lived so 

^ " If there be no second life, — pitch this one high,^^ 
cried Matthew Arnold {The Better Part). In the form stated, the non 
sequitiir is obvious and significant. 

2 Plato argued this out to a finality, quoting Socrates. See especially 
the Phcedo, 49, et passim. 



PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE 75 

deep in life as not wholly to be known to his contem- 
poraries. The immortal Italian was not a successful man 
of his times. He appeared to them a failure. No doubt 
among men now there are thousands on thousands who 
live deep in life, a silent folk, building themselves and 
supporting others. The true success of most of them 
will never be revealed on earjLh in their own days or 
after their death. And yet,, according to the measure of 
their worth and of their service, we ought to call them 
successful. Most men and women are failures, and most 
of us know that we are. 

This fact appears upon consideration, for unhappily it 
is susceptible of proof by demonstration. 

Of property, few leave at death more than they re- 
ceived at birth; and many have received from others 
more than they have returned. This is not always a 
matter of fault, though it is a matter of fact. 

Of religion, few manifest the fruits by the peaceful 
works of the spirit. "Pure religion and undefiled before 
God and the Father is this. To visit the fatherless 
and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself un- 
spotted from the world." * Were this not an irreligious 
age, as it unmistakably is,^ there might be some discus- 
sion upon the point as to whether most individuals are 
religious. Not to confuse morality with religion, let it be 
observed that the decline of charity and the increase of 
worldliness are too patent to permit discussion. Con- 
sequently, whatever may be the success or failure of 
most persons, considered broadly, their failure in religion 
must be admitted.^ 

^ Literally, Worship clean and stainless before the God and Father is 
this very thing, — to watch over orphans and widows in their distress, to 
guard one's self spotless from the times. James Epistle i, 27. In that Ro- 
man age, the passage was most significant. It is scarcely less significant 
in ours. 

^ Per contra^ Donald, The Expansion of Religion, passim. 

3 This failure of the many in religion must not be taken as a failure of 
religion itself. 



76 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

Evidence of an irreligious age is seen in the fact that 
in most cities, should all the people desire to attend worship, 
not one in five or in some instances not one in ten could find 
seats, while nowhere is it necessary for all the churches 
to resort to successive services with admission by card to 
prevent repetition of attendance. Again, this popular failure 
in religion is seen in the fact that the church, which symbol- 
izes religion, no longer receives the services and products of 
the finest artistic talents. And it is seen in the disappear- 
ance of the church universal. Men are no longer born into 
the church. A majority of Americans live and die churchless ; 
and the churchless man or woman is very seldom religious. 

In marriage, in home, and in family, most men and 
some w^omen are failures. Divorce, often amply justified 
by sins and even by crimes, prepares the v^ay for bigamy 
and even for polyandry and polygamy. Often divorce 
is avoided only by continuance in unhappy marriage, 
so profaned by faithless husband or wife as to be unholy. 
Not a fevs^ married men and fathers provide first for 
themselves and last for their wives and children. Home 
life for most persons is no longer an entirety, a force 
in itself. No mere tenant can feel a deep affection for 
his house and land ; he moves too often. Brothers 
and sisters part more easily in the twentieth century 
in America than ever they did in the dark ages of 
Western Europe. Too many men build houses, not 
homes ; marry women, not wives ; rear children, not 
families. The man and woman of property and of cul- 
ture, marrying and bringing into life a normal number 
of children,^ creating a home and establishing a family, 

^ There is a very general misconception of the functions of repro- 
duction among mammals. Almost the entire burden rests upon the 
female. The appearance of a second, a third, or a fourth child weaker 
than the preceding is a neglected signal. The birth of constantly stronger 
children is a neglected command. The particular norm for the particular 
parents is determined physically by such indications as these. The 
average norm for the Teutonic race may be taken as four children born 



PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE -jj 

are confronting the solid antagonsim of their class. ^ 
Few such persons care to rear families, while the igno- 
rant, propertyless masses cannot do so in their poverty 
and ignorance in opposition to modern economic forces. 
They multiply ; but they do not multiply homes. 

In education and in culture, the failure of most per- 
sons is too familiar for discussion. Few ever realize their 
powers. Few ever learn the best that is known, thought, 
and done in the world. Prematurely arrested in develop- 
ment, shut away, often willingly, from art and knowledge, 
they exist in superstition and in dependence, the slaves 
of the world, unrelated things in an imperfect cosmos. 

Of government, most men and women know nothing, 
even in democratic America. Why, then, does the Re- 
public proceed } Because every society, once in motion, 
tends to increase in numbers and proportionately in 
wealth '' to the point of diminishing returns," ^ a point 
in most regions not yet reached by us ; and because 
from the nature of the social conflict, the strong tend 
to rise to the mastery for which they are competent. 
Even democracy cannot prevent this. 

Of course, the failures of men in business are so 
numerous as to have passed into a proverb, — " Ninety- 
five per cent of men fail in business." This has been 
a matter of statistics. Syndicates, trusts, corporations, 
rise solely by the defeat of competitors. The successful 
become multimillionaires, magnates, capitaHsts ; the un- 
successful become their clerks ; and the masses grind 
on. In what .^ Fortunately, the grinding of the multi- 
tudes is in the various cultural, commercial, and domestic 
arts. This it is that saves us, for as a people we are im- 
proving in scientific knowledge and in technical skill. 

three years apart, with the mother passing from twenty-four to thirty- 
three years of age. Cf. Sociological Papers, ii, " Eugenics " by Galton. 

^ Rae, Sociological Theory of Capital, edited by Mixter, p. 358. 

2 Walker, Political Econojny, pp. 51-54. 



78 • EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

What, then, is it to be successful ? The foundation of 
it is health of mind, a large view of things, vital, effect- 
ive, vigorous relations to the world outside one's self, — 
a health that is conditioned, in part at least, upon one 
side or aspect, by health and by strength of body. And 
yet some have been successful despite ill-health, mani- 
festing, indeed, the noblest evidence of character in 
struggle against physical weakness and disease. Some 
inheriting poor physiques have by intelligence built for 
themselves sound bodies. But to return : needlessly to 
sacrifice health bears witness to deficiencies of intelli- 
gence and of will, even of heart, for he who is an invalid 
because of follies has carelessly burdened his friends. 
Though he be rich, he is still a total loss to the economic 
world, rendering it no return for its rents, interests, 
dividends, and profits. 

I call him successful who numbered a sufficiency of 
days ; who found a deep satisfaction in life ; who learned 
sympathy, patience, fortitude, courage, through trials ; 
who brought himself to order and the things of the world 
to order in relation to himself; who promised within his 
power of performance and changed not, though promising 
to his own hurt ; ^ who injured none more than himself, 
and desired not to injure even himself ; who rendered 
to the world in product and in service more than he 
received ; who lived as celibate in chastity or as husband 
in continence ; who made of his body a temple for his 
soul ; who loved truth and pursued it ; desired freedom 
and granted it ; was first just and then merciful ; first 
honest and then generous ; became disciple and apostle 
of the laws of essential Nature; and rejoiced to be a 
servant of God. Such a successful man is a living wit- 
ness that material wealth should be a consequent, not 
a cause ; and that it is not even a necessary consequent. 
After his death, his life becomes a delightful memory. 

^ David, Psalm xv, 4. 



PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE 79 

And him I call unsuccessful who by fault of his own 
failed of sufficiency of days to bring his soul to complete- 
ness ; who found no meaning and satisfaction in life ; 
who grew hard, impatient, timid, fretful ; who became 
erratic and disorderly, and set the world about him in dis- 
order; who in anxiety for the morrow promised more 
than his power to fulfill, and being hurt, shrank from pay- 
ing all ; who injured himself or others, debasing life from 
its purposes of joy and delight, — purposes inalienably 
the property of all living things ; because of whom the 
world was poorer in material wealth ; who by unchastity 
and incontinence defiled life at its fountains ; who forced 
his soul to abide in a body degraded into a mire or ethe- 
realized mto a shadow or converted into a prison ; whose 
yea was not yea, nor his nay, nay ; who accepted ser- 
vitude and enforced it; founded mercy upon injustice 
and generosity upon dishonesty ; preached and practiced 
the natural laws of the elements and of the brutes ; and 
declined the service of God. 

Clearly, and without exposition, the truth appears 
that to be successful, one must be intelligent, efficient, 
and righteous ; and it needs no argument to show that in 
the final analysis intelligence, efficiency, and righteous- 
ness are one quality, goodness. This, however, being un- 
defined, does not necessarily carry correct and adequate 
meaning.^ We mean not good as antithetical to evil, not 
good as antithetical to bad, but good as worth while be- 
cause it realizes life ; and, therefore, we mean good as 
antithetical to harm. Finally, upon all these considera- 
tions, and upon many others that are derived from com- 
mon sense, we know that to be successful is to fill life 
to overflowing, while to fail is to deny life content, mean- 
ing, use.2 The application of this principle becomes 

^ Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, edited by Tilly and Houseman, p. 8. 

^ " While from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he 

seemeth to have." Jesus, Luke, Gospel viii, 18. The context shows 



8o EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

increasingly easy and clear to the candid who desire 
success and depart from the pathways of failures ever 
crossing the "narrow way unto life." ^ 

It would be presumptuous for humanity to expect to 
know either the why of life or the object assigned to us 
by the Creator ; and very few individuals have dis- 
played the desire to know either the final "whence " or 
the final "why."^ The goal is not in sight. We may 
believe as Wordsworth sings, — 

" The soul that rises with us, our life's star. 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar."^ 

But though we inquire with Darwin what is the origin 
of the physical body, and expect to learn the truth some 
day, we do not expect in this finite life to learn when or 
how we were set apart from the infinite, or when or how 
we are to return again. ^ 

The soul in humanity that conditions the conscience 
of every individual, whatever be its origin, whatever be 
its coloring by physical being, knows true success and 
discriminates it from failure. And every educator owes 

unmistakably that understanding of life is the subject under discussion. 
Consider also the parable of the talents, Matthew, Gospel xxv, 15 ^^ seq. 
Jesus saw and taught perfectly the meaning of success and failure, and 
reiterated the principle involved. 

1 Jesus, Matthew, 6" ^^JT^if/ vii, 14. ttri . . . reflAt/xjuevT? ^ ^5bs ■^ a7rc{7ou<ro 
€ts t)?v ^co^v. Because confined (hterally, pressed in) the road leading into 
the life (of doing unto others as one desires them to do unto one's self). 
This teaching immediately follows the " Golden Rule." The pressing na- 
ture of such a course in life is due to the necessity to limit one's freedom 
by constant consideration and sympathy for others and by frequent 
self-denial. And yet this is the very way to save one's own life. Jesus, 
Matthew, Gospel xvi, 25. 

2 Tyler, The Whence and the Whither of Man ; ]2imes, Immortality. 

3 fjttimatiofts of I??imortality. 

< Jesus seems to have meant us to understand that the soul comes 
immediately from God and not via heredity, in parts, or via transmigra- 
tion, as a unit. This is consonant with his view of the soul after death. 
Per contra, Beecher, Cofrfict of Ages, p. 242 ; Hall, Adolescence, chapter x. 



PERSONAL SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN LIFE 8i 

it to every pupil to be certain that he discriminates suc- 
cess and failure and teaches his pupil so to discriminate. 
Moreover, every individual must be careful as to follow- 
ing examples and taking advice. Bitter truth though 
this may be, the failures cannot give good advice, nor 
are their examples either to be accepted or rejected, but 
to be ignored. The most successful give the least ad- 
vice ; and their lives are often so high and remote as to 
be beyond the vision of others, who are denied, there- 
fore, knowledge of them as examples. It should be a 
principle of life, first to determine whether this or that 
man is successful, truly successful, in affairs worth 
while, — marriage, parentage, business, property, gov- 
ernment, religion, culture, the practical arts and know- 
ledges, — before accepting him as an example, or even 
considering his advice. This involves individual thought, 
and upon proper occasion, action that flies in the face of 
all social imitation.^ 

Such self-alienation from society, from one's own 
friends, from one's own past, is absolutely essential to 
the life of continuous progress, 

^ Tarde, Social Laws, chapter ii ; Ross, Social Control, chapter v ; Le 
Bon, Psychology of Socialism, pp. 89-103; Baldwin, "The Final" Con- 
flict," Mental Development : Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 539. 



CHAPTER V 

EDUCATION IN RELATION TO PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 
MORALITY AND TO SOCIAL AND PERSONAL PROGRESS 

Education is the most important subject in which we as a people can be engaged. — 
Lincoln, Sangamon Address. 

We should so live and labor in our time that what came to us as seed may go to the 
next generation as blossom, and that what came to us as blossom may go to them as fruit. 
This is what we mean by progress. — Beecher, Life Thoughts. 

Always add, always proceed : neither stand still nor go back nor deviate. Be always 
displeased at what thou art. If thou sayest, "I have enough," thou diest. — Saint 
Augustine, Sermon, De verb, apost. (p. 196, Quarles'' Emblems'). 

A VASE of potter's clay stood in rain and in sun. There 
it had rested since the time whereof the memory of man 
ran not to the contrary. One day water pure as crystal 
began to well up within it. Day after day the water 
rose more and more freely, till at length it began to 
overflow. Thus the vase became a well of water. In 
this manner, the soul came to fill and to overflow the 
creature man. 

When came the water that overflowed the vase was 
mystery„ When comes the life that overflows the flesh 
is mystery. All that we know is the fact. But we feel 
that the soul springing up in us is the life eternal. We 
cannot conceive its beginning or its end ; nor can we 
know its nature. The mystery of the beginning and of 
the end and of the nature of man we say is of God, who 
is the sum and the essence of all mystery, yet more 
real than any visible, tangible, spatial, temporal reality. 
Visions, truths, wisdom, understanding, morals, inven- 
tions, ideas, come flooding into man; and whence } We 
say from God. And whither ? We dare not try to answer. 
And why ? To serve the purposes of God. 



RELATION TO MORALITY AND PROGRESS 83 

Who is God ? 

A universe answers, " I am." 

Man hears, "I am." 

Definition.? That is unthinkable. There are some 
who call whatever of the universe is understood by them 
knowledge, and the rest they call mystery or God ; and 
there are some who call whatever they understand God, 
and whatever they cannot understand they call mystery 
or Devil. ^ Who are we to pronounce that for which we 
are not responsible good or evil ? Our concern is solely 
with and in ourselves, as individuals and as humanity. 
Therefore, because man can hear the voice of **I am," 
man also knows himself as *' I am," and becomes a living 
soul, in the image of " I am." By this token, all the sons 
know the Father. 

The animals of His creation may be conscious ; but 
we have no evidence that they are self-conscious, as at 
times we are. Whatever be their case, it is ours to be 
conscious of ourselves and in that consciousness to hear 
His voice speaking as our conscience. 

The truth is but slowly won. The friend grows upon 
us in the fashion of patient Nature, by stages. We may 
know him only after many years. Our education, too; is 
very slow : it proceeds by invisible increments. In us, 
there follows regeneration after regeneration ; each re- 
generation is succeeded by a period when we are weak 
and docile after the manner of little children, viewing 
the new world with reticent yet curious surprise. 

Through the education of the individual, new truth 
finds its way into the world. ^ By one and another, it 
grows among men. 

Baldwin, " Religion in History," Americajt Historical Review, Jan., 
1907, p. 227. 

2 " Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am 
I in the midst of them." " I am the way, the truth, and the life : no 
man cometh unto the Father, but by me." John, Gospel xiv, 6. Jesus as 
a teacher comes with His doctrine of brotherly love and service where 



84 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

There is an education that invisibly modifies the color 
of life; and there is an education that turns black to 
white, darkness into light. In nature, the two are one ; 
for a change in quantity becomes a change in quality, 
as when heat is taken out of water at the freezing point, 
and the fluid water becomes solid ice. 

By new truth, each individual grows ; and by nothing 
else whatsoever. God has so constituted man that he 
grows upon truth, and that he sickens and dies because 
of superstitions, lies, falsities,^ when, recognizing them 
as such, he does not reject them forthwith. Likewise 
must society accept new truth and reject old errors. 

The process of society is to develop new institutions 
after the need has become strong, and to destroy old 
institutions after their usefulness has ceased. A new 
institution is always the product of new truth discovered, 
formulated, interpreted, taught in word and represented 
in deed at first by some individual thinker and doer. An 
old institution always endures until cut away and over- 
thrown by new institutions. 

"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good 
uncouth ; 
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of 
Truth." 2 

Naturally, man is ready for new truth upon which 
to feed his soul : but each man for himself discovers 
only a little new truth. As the lonely cultivator of the 
soil, without tools, without seeds, without markets, and 
without neighbors, can secure but scanty subsistence, 
so a man unassisted finds the field of thought hard and 

two or three are gathered ; and each learns His truth. This is true, of 
necessity, in modern psychology and in modern sociology, else these 
sciences would be such in name only. In social companionship, we dis- 
cover the divine and universal soul. 

^ Ward, Applied Sociology, pp. 117, 235. 

2 Lowell, The Present Crisis. 



RELATION TO MORALITY AND PROGRESS 85 

sterile and small of yield. ^ Give the cultivator tools, 
seeds, neighbors, advice, and exchange of products; and 
his field will yield abundantly, and his house will be 
filled with goods. Such is human society. Give the 
lonely thinker books, ideas, companions, counsel, and 
opportunity for expression ; and his character will de- 
velop resources, and his mind be filled with thoughts. 
Such is human education. 

To say that no more may be brought forth (educated) 
from a man than was born in him is to utter a mere 
combination of words. There is no evidence to support 
this proposition. Grant everything to historical physi- 
ology and to tradition ; and the saying is still without 
meaning. The nerve cells, and all other cells of the 
physical body, may be filled with capacities for this and 
that sensation or affection, handed down as the heritage 
of a million years of ancestral life ; race may be perma- 
nently characterized fundamentally, structurally, and su- 
perficially in generation after generation ; and son may 
be like father, scion proceeding pari passu with stirp : it 
still is obviously and essentially true that to pronounce 
the embryo or infant potentially the man, and the mind 
of the babe potentially the mind of the man, is really to 
assert their unlikeness and their inequality. So immea- 
surably disproportionate are the babe and the man that 
though ovum and sperm may dictate tendency, color, 
form, spirit, and norm, it is unthinkable that they dic- 
tate substance or content, whether of flesh or of ideas. 
Exactly as the physical body grows by gathering fluid, 
cell, and tissue from the material world, so the mind 
must grow by gathering motive, idea, and notion from 
the spiritual world. ^ 

1 Mazzini, Duties of Man, pp. 74, 93 (Venturi, transl.). George, Pro- 
gress and Poverty, p. 355. 

^ Lodge, '• Life," Hibbert Jonrttal, in LittelVs Living Age, January 27, 
p. 252. 



86 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

In this aspect, therefore, education is non-existent and 
impossible. The exact opposite is true. The man is not 
educated out of the boy; but inducted into him. The 
boy is grown by the metabolism of food into the man ; 
and education is put into the boy. This aspect, however, 
is only one side of the shield of truth. 

By nature, man is spiritually hungry for ideas, yet has 
characteristic tastes that govern his selection of ideas. 
Accepting as food the agreeable ideas, he grows upon 
them ; and this growth by ideas is education, formal and 
informal. Let it not be supposed that feeding upon ideas 
is mere accumulation of ideas. Some ideas are remem- 
bered as such : others are assimilated beyond recall as 
suchy to function later in the mode of will as motives^ 
or in the mode of feeling as ideals ^ or iii the mode of in- 
tellect as judgments} Let it not be supposed that the 
ideas really valuable in the education of a man are those 
which he remembers as such for recall in modo et forma. 
These are indeed less likely to be valuable than those 
which, destroyed in form and in mode, survive in the 
higher powers of motive or ideal or judgment. Nor, on 
the contrary, let it be supposed that the remembered 
ideas were indigestible but not rejectible. 

Most facts and most propositions are absolutely re- 
jected or completely ignored by the mind to which they 
may be expressed. A few are accepted and disappear, 
being perfectly assimilated. They become part and par- 
cel of the man at the time or for life, but lie in him 
beyond recall of consciousness. They are as completely 
forgotten as the food of days remote. Other ideas per- 
sist, sometimes for occasional recurrence upon sugges- 
tion or recollection, sometimes for periodical or even 
familiar presence in consciousness. What in us is of 
heredity we may class within the term instincts; what 
is of occasional recurrence upon recollection we may 

* Bagley, The Educative Process, chapters viii, xiv. 



RELATION TO MORALITY AND PROGRESS %7 

class under ideas ; ^ what is of occasional recurrence 
upon suggestion we may class under notions ; what is of 
periodical but infrequent presence we may class under 
purposes ; what is of periodical and familiar presence we 
may class under affections ; while what is perfectly 
assimilated beyond consciousness we may class under 
habits, and what is habitual and affirmative or active we 
may class under motives. However we may classify, in 
some system of psychological terminology or nomencla- 
ture, these ideas, instincts, passions, affections, pains, 
pleasures, fears, desires, sorrows, joys, griefs, anxieties, 
traits, habits, notions, purposes, emotions, prejudices, 
fancies, thoughts, motives, we know that they make us 
what we are, both second by second and also by our lives. 
They constitute our characteristics ; to us, they are rea- 
sons or as reasons ; in us as seen by others, they are the 
causes of our actions by which alone they know us : in 
the eyes of Him who sees all of us, they are ourselves, — 
our dispositions, characters, souls. ^ 

In a certain sense, the community has a disposition, 
a character, a mind, a soul.^ To other communities, it 
appears to possess characteristics that cause its actions. 
Its own citizens assign to these characteristics the dig- 
nified term of reasons. Obviously, the community is no 
real, integral entity, but merely a convenient term by 
which to express consciousness of kind, neighborliness, 

^ This word may be used in three several senses : {a) an image present 
in consciousness, immediately derived from sensation (that is, of peri- 
pheral origin) ; [b) an image present in consciousness by recall from pre- 
vious experience (that is, of central derivation) ; and (r) a process, a 
thought, a series. Cf. Titchener, Outlines of Psychology, p. 7. 

2 The text here is a mere analysis which, as Kanjt shows, adds no 
knowledge. My purpose is simply to express upon the principle of Fichte 
a rethinking in self -consciousness of the experience familiarly presented 
as a complete whole in direct consciousness or as disjunct units in a con- 
fused subconsciousness. Kant, Transcendental Analytic, § 15; Fichte, 
Wissenschaftslehre. 

^ Bosanquet, Aspects of the Social Proble7n, chapter xviii. 



88 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

the common interest and associated action of individuals. 
Obviously, therefore, the morals of a community can be 
changed only by a change in the morals of one and an- 
other of its individuals. 

The change in the morals of the individual must be such as 
seizes upon the imagination of the others or comes with a 
compelling conviction into their conscience. A city govern- 
ment may be corrupt ; and every one may know or at least 
suspect it. Meanwhile, all tolerate the wrongdoing and com- 
panion or ignore the wrongdoers. A single protestant can' 
sometimes destroy the whole "mind" of the community by 
sounding the discordant note of reform by word and deed. 

Where factions exist, there the individual can do but little. 
In a city of factions, there is no characteristic social mood. 

Whatever the individual gains in life beyond his in- 
heritance must come from the life "within the veil." 
The individual must draw from the universal. His obli- 
gation, therefore, is that of the honorable transmitter of 
the gains in no wise to be credited to his own merit. 
Moreover, he who really does serve as a conduit of 
thought, who is in any sense a prophet or inventor, 
always, necessarily, and inevitably seeks to convey his 
new truth to his fellows. This is the cause of all pro- 
gress, the origin of all martyrdoms, the first stage in 
the process of all human improvement. 

Education as a formal system cannot and does not try 
to provide these new ideas and ideals ; but whereas ordi- 
nary society always, necessarily, and inevitably resists 
the new idea, puts it to the proof, and usually rejects it, 
education is ready to offer its machinery for the propa- 
ganda of the idea. In this respect, education in the form 
of the school and culture in the form of the university 
are allies, but with different motives. Education desires 
to utilize the idea for the benefit of the learners, and 
really does give power to get the new, while culture tests 
the new, and, when it finds truth, desires to cherish it as 



RELATION TO MORALITY AND PROGRESS 89 

the heritage of the race. The result, of course, is finally 
the same, — the good of mankind. 

Education has two purposes, — the improvement of 
the individual and the maintenance of the community in 
civilization. By nature, one individual among many may 
rise through an unusual relation of receptivity to the 
universal life. By art, education proposes to bring the 
many others into relation with the ideas of the one ; or, 
taking the matter more broadly and also more familiarly, 
education proposes two things, — to bring forty or sev- 
enty or one hundred or one thousand youth together so 
that the many, through books, arts, and teachers, may 
associate with and learn from the few of " original gifts ; " 
and to bring to all the youth selected truths of the past 
as discovered and assembled by the best. 

But for schools, how many would hear " the best that is 
known and thought in the world " ? But for schools, how 
many would know anything of Lincoln, Emerson, Carlyle, 
Shakespeare, Luther, Plutarch, Caesar, Plato, even of the 
Master .? 

The argument, no doubt, involves acceptance of the pro- 
position that one who cannot originate thought may yet 
apprehend it upon its presentation : ^ in short, it postulates 
educability. 

Civilization relies upon education to remedy the defi- 
ciencies and the defects of our human nature. It requires 
no argument to show that, without a system of education 
able to affect large portions of every population, our 
various cultures would soon disappear by the natural pro- 
cesses of death, which carries away the cultured, and of 
birth, which brings in the ignorant. Let education cease, 
and in ten years the centre of social gravity would move 
from the literates and the efficient to the illiterates and 
the inefficient ; in twenty years, social chaos will then 

^ This is quantitatively the purpose of popular education. Ward, 
Applied Sociology^ pp. 229-69, 309. 



90 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

have ended in savagery. If education should cease, the 
entire structure of civilization — a structure built up 
through ten thousand years, obviously the human man- 
ner, the reflective disposition of man as a soul, a disposi- 
tion harmonized through forty thousand years — would 
disappear in less than a generation. Conversely, educa- 
tion, as an informing and infilling process, builds up the 
morality of each new generation. 

Education, in this sense, conditions civilization, for 
the essence of civilization is morality. 

The importance of this principle appears upon a con- 
sideration of the fundamental laws of population, which 
are too familiar to require more than a summary here.^ 

Average humanity, the humanity of muscle, energy, 
and emotion, the " plain people," " real folks " (to use 
the terms of Lincoln and of Riley), tend to multiply, as 
a matter of course, by a geometric progression that 
characterizes the biologic world. Normal, healthy, san- 
guine humanity, parent of all optimisms, full of faith in 
the rightness of the universe of God, trusts the future 
implicitly to the All-Father. Its conscious life sets no 
barrier to the animal life. Such humanity, bearing in its 
heart the race, brings offspring into life naturally and 
frequently. It weds early, almost carelessly, and breeds 
in each generation for twenty years. Six, ten, fifteen 
children may be the issue of a marriage. Eight grand- 
parents may have one hundred, two hundred grandchil- 
dren. Most offspring are mediocre like their parents, 
but there are some variants. Of these variants, a few are 
supernormal; most are subnormal or abnormal. The last 
die, or their children die, without issue. The superior 
variants tend to form classes, some economic, some cul- 
tural, some political. These superior classes produce also 

^ Patten, Annals of Americajt Academy of Political and Social Science, 
September, 1905. Gide, Principles of Political Ecojiomy (transl. Veditz), 
pp. 66-9. 



RELATION TO MORALITY AND PROGRESS 91 

their variants. In every population, therefore, at any 
given time, we find the classes, relatively small in num- 
bers, but great in authority, and the masses,^ relatively 
large but in subjection to the few. Above the classes, 
issuing from them or from the masses, towers an occa- 
sional genius, mayhap so far in the blue of the future 
that most men cannot see his light. Between classes 
and masses are other variants, some from above and some 
from below. Lastly, below the masses, are the variants 
of degeneration.^ 

the variants of genius . . . .001 % 

Classes — the superior 10 % 

the variants of talent ... 15 % 

Masses — the mediocre 50 % 

the inferior 10 % 

the variants of degeneration . 5 % 

Now the classes do not multiply by geometrical pro- 
gression or by arithmetical : they do not multiply at all. 
Genius is almost a childless stirp.^ Men and women of 
talent, as a class, produce fewer children than their own 
number. The variants from the masses keep the classes 
filled. The reasons for the infertility of the classes are 
two ; they are entirely obvious, historically certain, and 
inevitable. First, men and women of talent are by defi- 
nition and of necessity absorbed in the intellectual life. 
This life is not physically procreative or emotionally 
parental. Talent is race-suicidal ; it aborts from the main 

* George, Progress and Poverty ; Gumplowicz, op. cit., p. 129. 

2 The discussion ignores what the man of the world cannot ignore, 
viz. the varying degrees of nutrition of these souls and bodies. Super- 
nutrition (hypernutrition) afflicts one in a thousand. Subnutrition starves 
many. Malnutrition destroys a few. There is a malnutrition and there is 
a supernutrition of the soul as well as of the body. Often environment 
conspires with heredity to make or to wreck a soul. Oilman, Human 
Work ; Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children, p. 119. 

^ Within a few generations, even when a genius has children, his de- 
scendants disappear. This always happens when talent persists. 



92 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

stock ; it defies the physical. Wherein lies the second 
reason ? Men and women of talent value themselves : 
married, as parents, they value their children. Knowing 
the persistent tendency of offspring to revert to the 
race-types of mediocrity, they assert in thought, in act, 
and in word the preferability of quality to quantity in 
children ; which means simply that they produce few 
children and endeavor by education to insure their ris- 
ing to the parental level. That this education to mental 
superiority still farther exhausts the physical vitality is 
obvious; for such education burns the candle of life fast 
even though, by reason of the poverty that usually, and 
almost necessarily in the modern economic regime, at- 
tends the mental life, it does not burn the candle at both 
ends. Of such education, insterility is the inevitable 
result. 

As a formal system, education has three tasks. First 
6f all, education must help the natioji to maintam the 
classes} To supply talent with material for growth 
(whether that talent be by heredity or by variation) is 
the chief duty of every national system of education. 
The duty forces society to educate the children of the 
classes, especially such as seem likely to become capable 
of performing the functions of the classes. This is a dif- 
^:ficult enterprise, which necessitates preserving as far as 
possible the bodily health and efficiency of what is cer- 
tain to be, by the second generation, a depleted stock. 
Even intermarriage with the men or women of the 
masses cannot wholly prevent such depletion ; and it 
always imperils the heritage of talent.^ 

A more difficult enterprise for the maintenance of 
the classes, and the most important of the tJiree tasks of 

^ The doctrine of the text is that there are two genuine aristocracies, 
— of native talent, and of educated talent. The safety of a particular 
civilization lies in their harmonious association. 

2 Woods, Heredity in Royalty, pp. 283, 292, 298. 



RELATION TO MORALITY AND PROGRESS 93 

education^ is to utilize completely those variants from the 
masses zvho seem capable of rising into the classes. 
Upon the success of this enterprise depend the mainte- 
nance and the progress of every civilization. The classes 
may die away at the top without imperiling the nation, 
provided that the clever and industrious, the socially 
efficient, the best children of the masses, rise in suffi- 
cient numbers to fill the upper ranks. This is precisely 
the hope of American social democracy, and at the same 
time the peril of American economic feudalism.^ 

The third characteristic task of education is to prepare 
the masses for the rotctine work of the world and for ap- 
preciation of or submission to the classes. It is useless to 
disguise the fact that the mediocre man and the medi- 
ocre woman by definition cannot, and therefore do not, 
know certain things ; as, for example, the meaning and 
the method of government, the purpose and value of art 
and of literature, the relations of the past and present, 
and the tendency into the future. I am far from suppos- 
ing that any one, however able, however experienced, 
however cultured, really understands very much of the 
larger or of the higher life. Nor am I saying that the 
mediocre individual is blind, dull, insensitive to the tra- 
gedy and to the comedy of common life ; but I am seek- 
ing publicly to dispel a possible illusion that by some 
manner of educational wonder-working slight ability and 
energy can be converted into great talent. 

There is a familiar illtision that by election to office in State 
or in Church, an individual must become legislator or execu- 
tive or judge or trustee in fact. This illusion is due to several 
circumstances. The individual may become an associate of 
perhaps really competent representatives of the particular 
institution, whose glory extends beyond themselves to him. 
Again, by experience in office, he may become competent 
himself. Lastly, by election, he appears to sum up the social 
1 Ghent, Our Benevolent Feudalism : Class and Mass, passim. 



94 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

will, and is thereby dignified beyond individuality into 
democratic personality. By accident of fortunate choice that 
conspires with experience to bring the individual to wisdom, in 
a few instances the elected mediocrity by force of education 
in office becomes a capable person. It is the small number of 
such cases that justifies historically the interference of the 
classes by strategy and tactics to thwart the free choice of the 
democracy and to force the selection of the competent who, 
by present definition, belong to the classes. 

Education, then, as a formal system contributes to 
progress certain rescued individuals, whose powers other- 
wise would remain asleep. It moulds the masses into 
convenient social forms and facilitates the expression of 
their mediocrity, which otherwise is usually suppressed 
and sullen. It cultivates the classes, particularly in re- 
spect to their health and strength. 

Besides these three characteristic tasks, education has 
several other obligations to society. In respect to the 
natural genius, th-e obligation is first to discover him, 
then to renounce control over him, and, last, to serve 
him. To assert that the genius must submit to the law 
is a paradox to be accepted only upon subtle and compli- 
cated definition.^ In respect to the idiot, to the defective, 
to the blind, the deaf, the crippled, to the incorrigible, 
the criminal, the parasite, the weakling, the obligation is 
first to diagnose his case, then to find, if any, the remedy, 
and last, if possible, to redeem him. Only the science 
of the future, only the hoped-for philanthropy of the 
future, only God, the mystery, the winner of human 
hearts, contains all the solutions of these aflflicting, ab- 
sorbing, insistent problems. 

Education as a formal system has still another obli- 
gation to society, and one often subjected to bitter 
controversy. Education must evaluate the sciences and 
the arts, the knowledges and the skills, the exercises and 

^ Baldwin, Me^ital Development, vol. ii, p. i6o. 



RELATION TO MORALITY AND PROGRESS 95 

the disciplineSy the methods physical and the methods 
psychical^ and must determine their use in its own enter- 
prises. It must prescribe courses and create texts and 
lessons. In the performance of this function, education 
must endure at times even ridicule. Upon analysis, the 
obligation appears to be one essentially proper to educa- 
tion and calculated to elevate the school in dignity. The 
educator becomes the judge of history, its cultures, its 
men. And this is an eminently proper social function, 
for the past is valueless save as pedagogy ; ^ and the dead 
are worthless save as the teachers of living men. Thus 
history becomes sacred, in that it guides life ; and the 
dead live again in terrestrial immortality. 

Wherefore, it appears that the best of men should be 
the educators of the men-and-women-to-be. And we are 
brought to the conclusion of Plato ^ that philosophers 
should completely rule society. The political problem is 
how to get them into ofBce; the educational, how to 
produce them. 

The man of the classes, according to educational 
theory, or to biological fact, may not be formally recog- 
nized as such by any actual community ; and yet, beneath 
the forms, he will really be ruler. The old clothes, the 
begrimed overalls, the confined house, the petty income, 
and the narrow living of a common mechanic may con- 
ceal the inventor by whose ideas thousands or millions 
after his day may live. Fine clothing, a solitaire dia- 
mond, a brick mansion, free money, and generous hos- 
pitality may conceal the real clerk who obeys orders and 
rules no one. And yet "the classes" and ''the masses," 
as these terms are generally used in history and in cur- 
rent speech, conform in most respects with the real 
classes and masses. 

When education has created the universal School ; 

1 Harrison, Meaning of History, p. 9. 

2 The Repjcblic. 



96 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

when the child is born into the School, as to-day he is 
born into the universal State, and as in earlier times he 
was born into the universal Church, — when education 
has come into its own as government has, as religion 
once more should come, — the educator will hold himself 
responsible for social as well as individual progress, and 
for social as well as individual morality. This will in- 
volve on his part discerning the signs of the times.^ It 
will lift him out of particularism, beyond socialism, into 
humanity and eternity. Then he will ask of everything 
that he does, — Will this improve the race.? Will it 
strengthen this boy or girl, this man or woman, in im- 
mortality ? For humanity and immortality are insepa- 
rable from progress and morahty. The good man and a 
fit race must work both for progress and for righteous- 
ness. 

1 Jesus, Matthew, Gospel xvi, 3-6. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION 
(a) SOCIAL CAUSES, (d) PERSONAL CAUSES 

The results of American education have fallen far short of the hopes and expeetations 
of its founders and advocates. 

For millions of our children systematic education stops far too soon ; and for millions 
of adults the mode of earning the livelihood affords so little mental training and becomes 
•so automatic that mental training is seriously hindered, if not arrested. — Eliot, More 
Mofieyfor the Public Schools, pp. 51, 48. 

What we desire a youth to acquire is the power of overcoming difficulties and the corre- 
sponding habit of adequate achievement. — Hanus, A Modern School, p. 77. 

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future. — 
Euripides, Phrixas {Fragment^ 927). 

Education cannot fail and never does fail; but attempts 
to educate often fail ; and communities and individuals 
often fail to educate or even to attempt to educate. To 
say that a man's education has been a failure means that 
he has not had an education. We confront here un- 
pleasant but by no means unprofitable facts. For want 
of proper personal and social motives and values, pseudo- 
educations abound. 

Right social motives in education may be classified 
either in respect to society or in respect to the indi- 
vidual ; that is, society through one or other of its sev- 
eral institutions may organize education with a view 
to what it conceives to be its own general interest, or 
with a view to what it conceives to be the interest of 
each particular individual to be educated. In the first in- 
stance, the motive of society is to maintain itself, perhaps 
even to improve itself. Society may more or less con- 
sciously, less or more unconsciously, through its present 
universal, integral, and independent institution, the State, 
and through its other institutions, intend to secure from 



98 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

each generation leaders and disciples fitted to carry on 
the enterprises of civilization. Indeed, exactly this is 
being done, in China as in America, in Australia as in 
Argentina, in India, Russia, Germany, France, England, 
and Japan. In the second instance, the motive of society 
is very different, not antipodal, not antagonistic, but 
belonging to a different world ; it is a motive with no 
logical end.^ We like to believe in cause and effect; in a 
series of consequential events ; in eye for eye, tooth for 
tooth ; in nicely concatenated, logically related facts, rea- 
sons, and results, quantitatively and qualitatively measur- 
able and measured. In education so much history, in 
life so much patriotism ; so much civil government, so 
much citizenship ; so much arithmetic, so much finan- 
cial accuracy and acumen ; so much literature, so much 
authorship ; so much drawing, so much art ; in education 
so many lessons in morality, in life so many virtues ; 
thus we calculate, not altogether unsuccessfully. 

The second social motive in education, without reject- 
ing such calculations, utterly ignores them in theory and 
in practice. It recognizes that the soul of man is a strange 
alembic, producing sweet out of bitter, strength out of 
weakness, joy out of pain, life out of death, virtue out 
of vice, miracles without limit or end. Because without 
violence to logic and to experience, it cannot set evil to 
doing good, it discards every kind of casuistry. The 
boy treated with every kindness, supplied with every 
good thing of life, may grow up discontented, selfish, dic- 
tatorial, evil-minded. This, however, does not warrant 
deliberate education by unkindness and in poverty. Such 
a consideration floods the memory of every man and 
woman of experience with a tide of instances. We know 
from experience that poverty not reduced to destitution 
intensifies ambition; but we fear that its other results may 

1 For the distinction between motives per se and motives as ends, see 
Baldwin, Elements of Psychology, p. 282. 



THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION 99 

make this one good result far too dear. The exhaustless- 
ness and exhaustingness of these calculations are suffi- 
cient warrant for neglecting them all ; but they fail also 
because their results conflict and are therefore incon- 
clusive. 

As Art is different from and higher than work, as 
Art is not measurable in terms of work, so true educa- 
tion is different from and higher than social instruction 
and cannot be measured in the terms of preparation for 
social service. They who announce the philosophy of 
education for ends, — efficiency in this or that, apprecia- 
tion of this or that, grace of life, business, and success, 
— must submit to the challenge of promoting ideas and 
customs of class, and, it might be said, of caste. If so- 
ciety has the right to educate a boy, a class, a school, a 
city, or a country district for anything in particular, — 
whether gardening or bookkeeping or dressmaking or 
authorship or carpentry or officeholding, — then society 
has the right to make social classes, even castes, of 
gardeners, of bookkeepers, of dressmakers, of servants, 
of officeholders, of warriors, of lords ; for upon this sup- 
position society is higher than the individual, and each 
one of us, each child of ours, is but a means to an" end, 
whatever end society chooses. 

Such an opinion breaks down from several causes. 
The educational process that is expected to end in as- 
sured habits, character, and intelligence may disappear 
in a drift or maze entirely unexpected, or it may issue in 
the very opposite from the intended. We have three 
typical instances: i. The son of the carpenter, trained 
as a carpenter, becomes a very skillful carpenter. In this 
instance, heredity and instruction find, as it were, tilled 
and fertile soil, which bears fruit abundantly. Sometimes, 
the son of the carpenter, trained manually, manifests in 
mature life astonishing talents and skill in mechanical 
construction, displaying as it were the square or the cube 

Lef c. 



loo EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

of his original powers. 2. Another son of a carpenter, 
similarly trained, escapes from this particular manual 
labor to achieve success or to sink in a failure in an un- 
expected but definite life, it may be of statesmanship, of 
literature, of commercial affairs, of war, or of journalism. 
Maturity seems to be a non seqidtiir from youth. This 
is as thou2:h the life-current had worn out certain areas 
of the brain and then had turned to irrigate new ground. 
3. A third typical instance is that of the carpenter's 
son, trained to manual skill, who escapes from every 
kind of physical labor to become a dreamer or an idler, a 
wanton or a criminal. Here the life-current has worn out 
the familiar areas and broken away from all courses, 
inexplicably. Of these instances, the first is the most 
familiar, but the last occurs with sufficient frequency to 
warrant attention. 

We may reverse the cases, and follow the son of the vagrant 
till he becomes the skillful mechanic or the broad-minded 
journalist or the strong manager of men. In this instance, 
the misty life of the parent falls as morning dew upon the 
child. It may, indeed, be an advantage that one's parents were 
not too intense and definite in their thought and labor. 

This entire matter may profitably be reviewed in the light 
of the Hindoo caste system. In four generations, it may be, 
the efificiency of any stirp in a particular task is worn to 
shreds. Man is meant to be versatile. He whose sixty-four 
great-great-grandparents were each and all weavers may look 
upon weaving as his doom, and, as far as he has life at all, 
dream of any other life as bliss. To destroy a race, create 
caste in it. We of the free democracy take too short views : 
the son of the banker may be even more proficient as a 
banker, but in the fourth generation comes the dilettante or 
the artist or the philosophical or practical anarchist or states- 
man. The climax is in the third generation, then " back to 
the soil " of general culture. 

Society should not educate for ends, because in the 
long series of generations such education is systematic 



THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION loi 

degeneration, and in the single generation is too often 
futile to warrant the effort. A second reason seems 
equally valid, and may appeal even more strongly to 
democratic souls. Of whom is the society composed 
that is to determine the ends of education ? For man 
has not yet evolved any society, whether of family, of 
religion, of government, or of business, that has been 
without its head. This head is the executive of the so- 
ciety, and almost always executes a personal will. Here 
are ten boys of a village, ten thousand boys of a city. 
Who shall say for what ends each boy is to be edu- 
cated ?^ It will not do to say, "Each boy himself," for 
the boy who desires to be a railroad engineer or a sailor 
and is immediately gratified usually exhausts in a very 
brief time this particular will. Not always, of course ; 
but the foregoing discussion refutes this answer. Is 
each parent to decide ? Or the town-meeting ? Or the 
school principal ? Who, then ^ Clearly, no one ; no 
number or class of men. Until he is educated, not even 
the youth himself should determine what shall be his 
life-work. 

Still another reason why education for an end or 
towards ends is unwarranted in science or in rnorals 
is that such education is seldom education at all, but 
at best mere instruction. Why set a boy with the soul 
of an engineer to the task of becoming a Latin poet ? 
England tried that for centuries. The boy sickens or 
revolts or enters the treadmill ; but he is not educated 
or developed or enlarged in any way. On the contrary, he 
is driven back upon himself, disintegrated, discouraged, 
narrowed, devolved, at best only trained. We should not 
educate for ends, because we cannot. All instruction for 

1 " In all ages and among all peoples, men have talked much of their 
own rights and of children's duties ; we are beginning to assert chil- 
dren's rights and men's duties." Martin, *' Child-Labor," Proceedings 
National Ei.hccational Association, 1905, p. 103. 



102 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

an end is regimentation that reduces natural genius, 
talent, mediocrity, and inferiority alike into worse, and in 
the degrees of its extent and of its success confines the 
destiny of the race. The outcome of this pseudo-educa- 
tion is to compel the future to repeat, or to try to repeat, 
the past. All the retrogressive nations have been and yet 
are victims of education for definite or concrete ends. A 
certain nobility of character, a large intelligence, and a 
strong affection for youth are required in the parent, in 
the community, and in the nation when the elder and 
stronger renounce their power to direct towards ends the 
instruction of the younger and weaker. Yet it is wisdom 
to do this, for childhood is the fountain of life, and vaunt- 
ing maturity is already threatened by the avidity of death. 
We are never so blind to what education really is as 
when we boast that we see it in some definite prospect 
in life for a particular child. They who teach the love of 
all truth, of all beauty, and of all duty, which are science, 
art, and the moral law, are the true educators. Like 
sanity and health, these are the only ends because they 
are also the beginnings of education, its conditions, 
limits, modes, its all-in-all. We seek the higher type, but 
cannot know what it is. They who seek constantly find.* 
But they who say, *' Let us have more of such as now 
are," shall not have even these, for these who are now 
were found by seekers after higher types, ''stalwart old 
iconoclasts," desiring a higher virtue than any yet beheld. 
For yet another and a final reason, — the last and the 
sufficient reason, — education for ends breaks down and 
must break down in a free democracy in consequence 
of the rapid changes of its social structure. We cannot 
prepare for ends, for there are no ends. Everything is in 
process, is tentative, is a stage in the journey toward a 

* ** And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more 
to me and more in my meditations, than you might suppose." 

Whitman, Brooklyn Ferry. 



THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION 103 

goal. He who comes out of school prepared to do some 
particular thing finds that thing soon changed to some- 
thing else, — changed in its relations or in its spirit. 
Unless educated in power, in ingenuity, in character, 
the man finds that the world has moved away from him- 
self irrevocably ; he has lost his foothold, and can make 
no other. All educators know this, all educators under- 
stand this now and have always understood it ; and this 
is the evidence, the sign manual of their fitness to be 
educators : to know that education is a thing in itself, 
the creation of new and better conditions of body and 
spirit, and never consists in things outside of itself.^ 

But the first and most general of the social causes of 
the failure to educate is exactly this, that they who are 
not educators, but in respect to education laymen, — 
whether they be clerics or clodhoppers, — believe in edu- 
cation for ends, as far as and whenever they believe in 
any education at all, nominal or in their own notion real. 
In a democracy, all these laymen vote, and by their votes 
they control, directly or indirectly, or at least condition 
and limit, the education proposed and desired by profes- 
sional educators, whom, therefore, they are very apt to 
hold in a fine, or perhaps a coarse, scorn. Whatever be 
the mode by which democracy operates or is operated, the 
State is in some degree master of the School. Often, 
perhaps almost always, the State erects itself as the chief 
end of the School. Educators are to prepare youth for 
citizenship ; such is the watchword and the catchword. 
Such an end, noble as it is when properly conceived, 
limits the reform of government, and, still worse, limits 
the growth of the soul. In their present servitude to 

^ " The educated man is he who consciously and deliberately holds an 
intellectual ideal of what he himself and other men are capable of becom- 
ing, and who, in some measure, has the knowledge and the skill to put 
this ideal into practice ; he is trained to cooperate in the purpose of 
human progress." Gore, Birmingham Address, Educational Review, June, 
1906. (Also School World, March, 1906.) 



104 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

State or Church, educators are usually unable to con- 
ceive what they would do in freedom. The social order 
needs the criticism and the construction of the very best 
souls to be found by education in every generation, and 
of as many great souls as possible. These can be secured 
only by education free from all particular ends. 

A lesser social cause of the failure to educate is dis- 
belief in the reality or even the possibility of education. 
We talk of universal education in America, meaning 
that nearly every child goes to a school until twelve or 
thirteen years of age ; but when we begin to think, we 
realize that most of the schooling is merely training, and 
that nearly all of it is soon forgotten in life, in the world's 
work, which begins for most of us before adolescence. 
Since by far the greater part of our society consists of 
persons not educated, the social disbelief in the reality 
of education is easily accounted for. Not infrequently 
this disbelief takes the irritating form of attributing to 
illegitimate and even unmoral causes the success of 
educated men. It is indeed difficult to persuade most 
men that the lawyer has risen to the bench, the mechanic 
to the directorate, the teacher to the superintendency, 
without resort to force or to chicanery. It is to be re- 
gretted that most men prefer to attribute the superiority 
of the few to the fortune of superior natural gifts or to the 
resort to devious methods, to lawbreaking, or to force. 
It is the exceptional uneducated man who sees that 
education, considered not as mere knowledge-having, 
but as improved power, has given a proper advantage to 
others over himself, or that it would have made himself 
able to render larger service in the world. The less can- 
not comprehend the greater, and seldom apprehends it, 
has any insight into it.^ 

1 The method that brings genius and talent to fruition is the same 
method that develops in the rest of mankind power to assimilate their 
products. Cf. Ward, Applied Sociology, pp. 292-93. 



THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION 105 

While most persons have no faith in the reality of 
education, a few of these refuse to believe even in its 
possibility. These few assert that all talent is original, 
active, and obvious, and that what appears to be educa- 
tion is merely the possession of knowledge or of skill. 
Such persons, when logical, demand of the School that 
it sift the bright from the dull, the strong from the 
weak, the active from the lazy, and the good from the 
bad, reject all the latter, and supply all the former with 
knowledge and training in skill. Superiority, mediocrity, 
inferiority, is fate ; and to superiority belongs the right 
to control and to enjoy the world. This notion afflicts 
the poor as well as the rich ; and through many ages 
has caused the selection of the bright boy to enter the 
ministry or the priesthood while the others drift into 
drudgery, war, or trade. We hear everywhere the piti- 
less challenge. What is the use of trying to educate ? 
Are not most persons born to obey ? Classes and castes 
are natural.^ Poetry is full of the challenge and of the 
angry defiance of this challenge.^ 

A fourth cause of the social failure to engage scien- 
tifically in education is objection to its results. This 

1 This, of course, is the burden of most poetry from Homer and Ver- 
gil to Scott and Tennyson. In politics, only modern democracy has ever 
challenged the proposition that " Nature " doth " complexions divide 
and brew." Dryden, O/iver Cromwell. See Pearson, Science and the 
State, Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 32, p. x. 

2 E. g. Emerson, Boston Hymn : — 

" God said, I am tired of kings, 
I suffer them no more; 
Up to my ear the morning brings 
The outrage of the poor. 



" I will have never a noble, 
No lineage counted great ; 
Fishers and choppers and ploughmen 
Shall constitute a state." 



Cf. Story, lo Victis ; ^\i\\.mz.n. Leaves of Grass — Heroes; Lowell, 
A Parable ; Burns, Is there for hoiiest poverty ? 



io6 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

cause is very closely allied to a fifth, which is mere 
avarice. The comparatively few who see that education 
is real may be divided into two groups, — those who 
see that its fruits are worth while and desirable, and those 
who deny this. True education assuredly leads out of 
the world, the age, away from its standards ; it evaluates 
everything anew. The well-educated man or woman sees, 
as did Seneca, that a great property is a great servitude ; 
as Marcus Aurelius did, that power delays the progress 
of the spirit. The moralists dwell much upon this aspect 
of education. But to some these new values set upon 
truth, beauty, and goodness appear foolish, especially fool- 
ish at the three costs. It is perfectly true, they may per- 
haps admit, that education is real and culture delightful ; 
but they will not also admit that, as compared with the 
costs, education and culture are worth while. 

The first cost is in money : public schooling at twenty 
to fifty dollars a year in elementary grades, more in high 
school and in university, private schooling at one hun- 
dred or one thousand dollars a year from kindergarten 
through professional school ; total, from a thousand to 
ten thousand dollars, even more, and for what ? To learn 
that we are to live for truth, goodness, and beauty, which 
neither clothe nor amuse us, but lay upon us heavy bur- 
dens. The second cost is in time. While the boy is grow- 
ing up, he spends two decades, a third of life, in study ; 
and he comes out with not a dollar to show for it all. He 
may not have acquired even a profession or an art by 
which to live. Interim, most other boys have made a start 
in business. But the third cost runs usually throughout 
life. To the average or median man, he who is well 
educated lives a life that appears to be a life of self- 
denial. This applies equally to the well-to-do educated 
man and to one who was born poor, has continued to be 
poor, and may perhaps prefer to be poor in material 
goods. The educated man takes life itself as a school, 



THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION 107 

considers its sole end, education, — that is, yet more life. 
He means to involve the world in himself, not himself in 
the world. Of course, to the owner of the park, palace, 
and picture-gallery, this doctrine of the man who prefers 
to understand and to enjoy rather than to possess and 
to guard may appear to be, in the phrase of ^Esop, *' sour 
grapes ; " but it will not so appear to the owner who 
himself also is educated, for he knows that his real pos- 
session of park, palace, and pictures is his understanding 
of them. When entirely educated, he presents them to 
the public that all may see and understand them. Con- 
sider the difference between the soul of Millais, who 
painted pictures, and that of the ordinary millionaire who 
buys them ; and answer which truly possesses the picture. 
Upon closer analysis, the denial of self is rather upon 
the part of him who accumulates wealth, and as price of 
product or of service or in endowment contributes from 
that wealth to the scientist, artist, or philosopher who 
has preferred life to things. 

As far as the social failure to educate proceeds from 
unwillingness to expend money and time, it may be 
quantitatively measured. The cost of education is very 
small, indeed, in comparison with the cost of other good, 
as mankind chooses to value the good. The American 
people choose to measure the value of such education as 
they are willing to provide as one third that of tobacco 
annually, one fifth that of alcoholic drinks.^ In educa- 
tional plants, public and private, we have invested one 
tenth as much as we have in steam and electric railroad 
transportation. Statisticians may assert that there are 
other modes of education than those provided by schools 
and by colleges, and that transportation is educative ; 
but we may answer, first, that much that is spent upon 
education never accomplishes or at least does not directly 

'Chancellor, Our Schools, pp. 352, 360; A Textbook of Americajt 
History, p. 544, 



io8 EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

effect that purpose, and, second, that a very great part 
of all other expenditures is directly anti-educational 
and degenerative. The statistician then may reply : 
we cannot evaluate education in the terms of dollars 
and cents, and should compute rather the number of 
persons giving their lives to educational work as com- 
pared to the number doing other things. The teachers 
of America number two thirds as many persons as our 
tailors and dressmakers, and two thirds as many as 
our steam and electric railroad employees. The man who 
spends as much directly or indirectly for the educa- 
tion of a family of four children as upon tobacco for 
himself is the average man ; as many spend less as spend 
more.^ 

But there are not only social causes of the failure of 
education : the personal causes are as potent and yet 
more numerous. Some of these personal causes may be 
classified, but others are essentially individual. Several 
causes are personal only in the immediate sense, for, 
traced remotely to their origins, these also are social. 
There are the two great physical causes, — lack of 
proper food, clothing, and sleep, so that the body cannot 
develop the surplus energy required for education ; and 
bodies so badly constituted by heredity that their condi- 
tion is not remediable in the immediate present. Poverty 
and heredity, separately or in conspiracy, prevent many 
and many a child from being educated. When the right 
of the child to all, if need be, of the surplus resources 
of a particular society above its actual total economic 
cost of living shall be established in public opinion by 
being understood, then the poverty of individuals and 
of the State will cease to be an excuse for leaving the 
child physically incapacitated for education, and poverty 
will cease to be a cause of individual failure to be edu- 
cated, and slowly the heredity of the generations will 

^ U. S. Census Statistics, 1900. 



THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION 109 

be improved so that this, too, will cease to be a cause. ^ 
In that day, which lies in the path of the future, public 
education will no longer be merely an important ''de- 
partment " of general or local government, but will direct 
what little of government, in the sense of governing, 
may remain to do. The right of the soul to as large a 
life as possible without limiting the life of any other soul 
is the paramount right in this world and in any and 
every other; and man grows into that right as certainly 
as he grows at all. Time was when society rotated upon 
the axis of property. Time came when society rotated 
upon the axis of religion. Time proceeded until society 
found its axis in government. Time now is when so- 
ciety rotates upon the axis of business. And time will 
be when society will rotate upon the axis of education. 
Then mankind will know what modern philosophy now 
knows, that the Perfect established the imperfect that 
it might grow into the Perfect again. ^ As Tennyson 

sang,' — 

" Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." 

The universal process is education, an idea incompre- 
hensible to all men five thousand years ago, but familiar 
to more and more thousands every year now, and soon 
to be the criterion of all the living. Evolution, as seen 
by man, is only informal education ; unquestionably and 
questionlessly altogether formal, deliberate, and inten- 
tional in the mind of God.^ 

The personal failure of individuals to be educated has 
other causes than the physical as presented by poverty 
and by anemic or defective heredity. From mere excess 

1 George, Progress and Poverty, chapter i. Cf. Maxwell, New York, 
Report to Board of Education for i9o6.' 

2 Weber, History of Philosophy, p. 527. 

3 In Memoriam. 

* Cf. Jesus, Matthew, Gospel v. 18. 



no EDUCATION AND SOCIETY 

of physical life, of "animal spirits," some cannot submit 
to education. Were educators sufficiently numerous to 
reach all children and youth early enough and to keep 
them ever in relation to themselves, such cases would 
be few. 

Some fail to be educated because of family or group 
environment, from not the general but the particular 
social conditions. Every influence outside of the school 
maybe anti-educational.^ It is needless to specify. Chil- 
dren with malicious fathers, mothers, relatives, compan- 
ions, fall into evil circumstance at birth or in the course 
of their lives. Some are born malicious or self-willed or 
intense beyond possible recall to large intelligence, to 
industry, and to good will.^ It is merciful that these cases 
are few ; but they are indisputable. Not the foundling 
only, taken as an adopted son, but the son himself of the 
good mother and father, cherished for twenty years, at 
maturity "turns out bad," may, indeed, always have been 
"a bad boy." Of course, as a matter of physiology, we 
must believe that something is wrong in the convolutions 
of the brain or elsewhere, and, as a matter of theology, 
we must always believe that the real soul is good. But 
in point of temporal fact, what we find is a soul so 
conditioned physically that it seems set against truth, 
beauty, and goodness. 

However, of not even the worst of these does the 
genuine educator allow himself ever to despair. He will 
seek them even in the penitentiary and in the brothel 
and try to reform them by education. The number of 

1 Folks, The Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children, 
passim ; Hunter, Poverty ; Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children. 

2 " Our passions are the harshest of all tyrants ; give way to them 
but a little, and we shall be in a state of ceaseless conflict, unable to 
breathe freely a moment. They betray and wring the heart ; they 
trample reason and honor under foot : they never say, ' It is enough.' " 
Coit, after Fenelon, " Spiritual Letters to Men," cxxiii, in the Message of 
Man. 



THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION in 

marvelous regenerations constantly grows. ^ Education 
is nothing but religion enlightened and energized, but 
always and essentially the religion of the faith that all 
are the sons of God, and that as long as He lives even 
the worst may be redeemed.^ 

^ "One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him." — 
Channing, The Elevation of the VVorktng Classes, p, 414. The modern 
educational faith holds yet more strongly that one good art well learned 
regenerates with certainty. See Reports, National Prison Association; 
especially Elmira Reformatory. 

2 "The product of the ages past, 

Heir of the future, then, am I ; 
So much am I divine that God 
Cannot afford to let me die." 

Savage, My Birth. 



PART TWO 

THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

The true source of the life of science is to be found in its media- 
tion between spirit and mechanism, when it shows how absolutely 
universal is the extent, and at the same time how completely sub- 
ordinate the significance, of the mission that mechanism has to 
fulfill in the structure of the world. — Lotze, Microcos7mis (Ham- 
ilton-Jones translation), vol. i, Preface, p. xvi. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PRESENT SUBORDINATION AND DEPENDENCE OF 
THE SCHOOL 

The schools, in general, have occupied an intermediate position between church and 
state, responding always to influences from both sides, but affected chiefly in earlier 
times by ecclesiastical considerations and in later times chiefly by considerations of a 
political character ; and at all times they have been open to more diffusive influences, 
economic, literary, and social. —Brown, The Making of our Middle Schools, p. i. 

The race that gives its children the most effective training for life, sooner or later, 
becomes a dominant race. The training of the young to skill of hand, to accuracy of 
vision, to high physical development, to scientific knowledge, to reasoning, and to practi- 
cal patriotism is the best and cheapest defense of nations.— Maxwell, " Education for 
Efficiency," Proceedings National Educational Association, 1905, p. 60. 

And as in knowledge, so it seemed to us in life also to be the sum and substance of 
wisdom neither to neglect what is small nor to give it out as great; to be enthusiastic 
only for that which is great, but to be faithful even in the least. — Lotze, Microcosmus 
(Hamilton-Jones translation), vol. ii, p. 728. 

Names deceive and mislead. In elder times, a fever was 
a fever. Now we know that a fever may be typhoid or 
pneumonia or enteric or something else. To advance in 
knowledge, we must learn to discriminate. A college 
may be a business college or a college of pharmacy or a 
college of the arts and sciences. Schools are of two 
kinds, but of many classes. The first kind of school is 
the school for education ; the other kind is the school 
for training. Schools for education may not be farther 
classified or resolved into groups. But of schools for 
training there are as many classes as there are purposes 
to which the training may be devoted. By definition, the 
school for training, whether that training be in bookkeep- 
ing or in military drill, in tinsmithing or in navigation, in 
teaching or in nursing, is not a true school, for that is 
dedicated to leisure. Growth of the mind can take place 
only in leisure, for when all the nervous life of the body 
is consumed by effort to conform to external requirement, 



ii6 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

no surplus remains. The surplus of vital energy is the 
mother, the culture, the plasma of mental power. Persist- 
ence in nervous exhaustion makes ruin of the mind. 
And yet more delicately and subtly : Persistence in re- 
ceptivity to suggestions eats away that originality which 
is the cause of mental growth. Training may be at the 
expense of ingenuity. 

Training schools must be ; but training schools are not 
within the purview of education. We need some new word 
by which to designate this pseudo-school. Unfortunately, 
college has long been used too honorably to permit without 
protest its reduction now to mere utilitarianism ; seminary 
by root-meaning has the significance of school, which is seed- 
sowing, seed-ground, growth, and therefore cannot well be 
distorted so as to mean training school ; and last is academy, 
with many fine associations, but without philologic content. 
I fear that it must be "riding academy," " teaching academy," 
"barber's academy," " military academy," "business acad- 
emy," when, if ever, we are logical. 

The school must never be confused with the univer- 
sity, though it must always blend with it. The college 
is half school, half university ; and like many half-breeds, 
is perhaps the better for its mixed sources. The univer- 
sity is for culture. In the school, knowledge is imparted 
for the sake of the pupil ; but in the university, that the 
knowledge may be preserved in the world. The univer- 
sity is the shadow of the ancient temple thrown athwart 
the centuries. All sciences or knowledges, all arts or 
skills, useful for the heritage or endowment of man, are 
welcome to its sheltering care.^ 

In the ancient Egyptian world, the temple was at once 
a home of the priests, a church of the people, a palace of 

^ The peculiar function of the university in a democracy is to " purify, 
refine, ennoble, and enrich the resultant of all the past and then to 
pass it over to the future." Thwing, History of Higher Education in 
America, p. 447. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 117 

government, a treasury of wealth, a court of law, a school of 
learning, a museum of art, a hospital of healing, an exchange 
for goods, and a mausoleum of death. We call the scholars 
who controlled the temples priests ; but they were far more 
than preachers and pastors.^ They were also landowners, 
traders, rulers, jurists, bankers, teachers, scientists, artists, 
architects, physicians, and embalmers. They owned the na- 
tion, the land, and the bodies and souls of the people.^ The 
temple survives to-day in the university. Though without 
visible and substantial authority, the modern temple of learn- 
ing, of skill, and of wisdom is not less powerful than the 
ancient. 

The university, therefore, is the nursery of all the 
professions and of all the arts. It is not indifferent to 
educational values, but regards education as of incidental 
and minor importance compared with the necessity, 
from its point of view, of maintaining culture in man- 
kind, and with the desirability of increasing by research 
the sum of human knowledge, and by teaching and by 
practice the range and the quality of human skill. The 
university has for its foci the library and the laboratory. 
Its various schools are training schools in practice and 
in substance, but not in spirit and in atmosphere; for 
though their purpose is to develop their students in the 
knowledge of their science and in the technique of their 
art, — the characteristic and typical purpose of all train- 
ing schools, — this purpose is subordinate to the true 
university purpose, which is to maintain science and art 
in the world. 

Unfortunate as is our inability to discriminate by single 
title between the school, the training school, and the 
university professional school, and unfortunate as is our 
confusion of notions regarding school, seminary, academy, 
and college, we are even more unfortunate in our in- 
ability to discriminate clearly by single title between 

^ Lippert, Allgemeine Geschichte des Priesterthiims. 

2 Maspero, Egypt (transl. by Sayce), vol. i, chap, iii; vol. ii, chap. i. 



ii8 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

pedagogue, teacher, instructor, educator, professor, in- 
vestigator, and in our confusion of notions regarding 
them. The term pedagogue is as entirely useless as 
psychogogue would be. Teacher might properly survive 
as the generic term to include all who impart knowledge 
or train in skill, whether kindergartners or college presi- 
dents. Educator should designate those whose object 
is development of their pupils in force, in skill, and in 
self-control. Professor should designate those whose 
object is inculcation of knowledge. Instructor should 
designate the intermediate class of teachers whose ob- 
jects are equally knowledge and skill. But such discrim- 
inations would be entirely unacceptable at present. The 
heads of colleges and of universities are seeking to take 
to themselves the titles ''educators" and "education- 
ists," terms, of course, as dissimilar in content as artist 
and scientist. The educator is the accomplished teacher 
of boys and girls, while the educationist is the student 
and expositor of the science or history or philosophy or 
practice of education. 

Not until our notions are clear upon these matters, 
irrespective of popular and even professional usage, are 
we ready to proceed in our inquiry into the nature of 
education. Though the life of man lies really not in what 
is, but in what ought to be, the education that exists, the 
actual school, is often mistaken for true education. It is, 
of course, a fact that the State, the Church, the Family, 
and every other social institution similarly suffers. The 
real State, for example, is but a torso of the State that 
ought to be ; and to know this is not necessarily to foresee 
socialism or any other "ism" incarnated in the State. 
It is merely an evidence of intelligent sanity to under- 
stand that whatever is ought to be better in time to 
come. But the School suffers from the dullness of men 
in ways that seem to be exceptionally, extraordinarily 
unfortunate. This may be an illusion of nearness and of 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 119 

intimacy and of interest ; but it seems to require con- 
sideration. 

Wlierever the School exists, it is a subordinate and a 
dependent social institution, in this respect contrasting, 
in America, absolutely with Property, Family, State, 
Church, Culture, and business. This subordination and 
this dependence exist not merely in respect to material 
support, the means of existence, the absence of right to 
tax and to own ; ^ but exist also in respect to function 
by reason of limitations, most of which are illogical, un- 
scientific, unrighteous, and injurious. The School is 
always subordinate to the institution upon which it is 
wholly or mainly dependent. Its morality, therefore, 
tends to be that of the slave. 

The reasons why this has not been more frequently 
observed are two : first, most men are enslaved, unfree, 
traditional, subservient ; ^ and therefore they fail to note 
a characteristic like their own ; and, second, the morality 
of servitors is entirely acceptable to rulers, and is, there- 
fore, not reprehended. To the masses, the School, what- 
ever it be, is in spirit like themselves : to the classes, it 
is agreeable because lacking resistance, 

A proposition so radical may warrant some consideration. 
Superior men are born to rule. They may be born in the 
class of rulers or in the class of the ruled : it matters not : 
they rule by virtue of qualities, exactly as inferior men serve 
by virtue of qualities. The qualities of the ruler are his 
morals ; the qualities of the servant are his morals : but the 
morals are diametrically opposite.^ Because he is ruler, the 

^ The right in some states of a board of laymen, controlHng education, 
to tax, is not a right of the School, but a direct denial of that right. In 
a certain respect, the appearance in America about the middle of the 
nineteenth century of boards of education, consisting of laymen, author- 
ized to conduct schools, was a gain, for it showed and promoted the 
interest and enthusiasm of general society in the progress of education. 

2 Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order. 

3 Nietzsche was not the first to see this, but he emphasized it and ex- 
panded it into a system. See Genealogy of Morals, essay iii. 



120 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

one ought to be independent, self-reliant, dictatorial, strict, 
frank, exacting, masterful, that the work of the world may be 
done efficiently ; because the other is servant, he ought to be 
dependent, humble, obedient, silent, servile, resentful, that 
the work of the world may be done agreeably. Give the mas- 
ter his way too freely, and the workers would perish from 
overwork and underfeeding in peace and from wanton sacrifice 
in war • give the servant his way, and the world, with its 
wealth and its people, would be wasted by indolence and 
ignorance in peace and by malice in war. To the master, the* 
masterful seem good and the servile bad ; to the servant, the 
servile seem good and the masterful evil ; to the philosopher, 
who knows only the good and the harmful, the morals of each 
seem one-sided and biased. To the ruling class, honor is the 
chief virtue ; to the serving class, honesty. A lord will pay 
his gambling debt, but cheat a tradesman ; a mechanic will 
pay his grocer, but, in distress, desert wife and children. A 
gentleman tells the truth ; a servant keeps the peace. In 
America, there are many in the middle class, sharing more 
or less in the virtues and, sad to say, in the vices of both 
rulers and servants. Philosophers, believers in the whole 
life, desire only the virtues of that life, which are few and 
clear, — singleness of heart, zeal to know the truth, consid- 
eration for others, faith in the constitution of the world of 
God. But these virtues are rational, and therefore remote 
from many. 

A particular feature of the problem of Negro education, 
so called,^ is the attempt to reduce them all to the servant 
class with the servile morality, while, in fact, in the city pop 
ulations of the Negroes, the mulattoes, so called, who are 
really mestizos^ prevail, and in the country populations the true 
Negroes, the pure blacks, who are often descended from the 
stocks of African rulers. Now the mestizos are but brothers 
and cousins in saffron of the men and women in white. 
Formal education, forgetting the "color line within the color 

^ There can be no " Negro education " or Hebrew education or 
American education any more than there can be Negro or Hebrew or 
American truth. Education is whole, colorless, ageless, universal. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 121 

line " and the natural classes of all mankind, too generally 
attempts to impose upon these mixed races habits of thought 
and action suitable to the serving class only. The truth is 
that the Negro desires and needs the resources of the entire 
encyclopaedia of education in matter and in method. 

In this subordination and dependence, the School is 
forced to assume a position and a character entirely con- 
trary to its real nature. When education looks to govern- 
ment or to religion or to the arts for its ideals, its goal, 
it contradicts itself. Jesus said, "Except ye become as 
little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." ^ 
This is a principle, not a particular statement of tempo- 
rary meaning. For its goal, education must look into the 
pure soul of man, such a soul as that of the little child. 
The truth will be found not in the social institutions, 
not in the veteran souls, seasoned by experience, immune 
by infections resisted or endured, but in the young souls 
stepping forth out of the skies into the world of men 
and things. To look in the manner of the child without 
prejudice upon things as they seem really to be is more 
nearly to find them as they are than falls to the lot of 
the adult man. The goal of education is truth, delight in 
truth, understanding of truth, faith in truth. This truth 
is no matter of prescription, no truth that needs bul- 
warking by laws, by exhortations, by ridicule and sneer, 
by threats, by institutions, by force of any kind what- 
soever save its own self, its very nature. 

" Truth only needs to be for once spoke out, 
And there 's such music in her, such strange rhythm, 
As makes men's memories her joyous slaves, 
And clings around the soul, as the sky clings 
Round the mute earth, forever beautiful." ^ 

All modern science is but systematizing, persisting 

1 If ye do not turn about and become as the children, ye will never 
{ov fi-fi) enter into the kingdom of the skies. Matthew xviii, 3. 

2 Lowell, A Glance behind the Curtain. 



122 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

in, trusting such simple interrogations as are universally 
characteristic of the child. The very affirmations of the 
child have the validity and universality of the highest 
philosophy. And why not ? Whence save from revela- 
tion can come new truth ? And what is a child but a 
new, a last revelation ? 

A little child, not yet three years old, was swinging two- 
pound dumbbells. Her father asked her whether they did not 
tire her. Proudly arching her chest, she replied, " Dod did 
make me tong (God did make me strong)." To test her, the 
next day her mother asked her the same question under the 
same circumstances with the same reply. This occurred in a 
family by no means given to religious ceremonies or discus- 
sions. Such certainty was beyond that of Kant. God and the 
goodness of God to man and the gratitude or love due from 
man to God are as much " intuitions " as are time and space. 
Whether they be intuitions or ideas slowly accreted through 
ages is a matter of indifference. The Power, the Father, God, 
may teach truth to man in an instant or through ages : cer- 
tainty of this is a condition of sanity, of intelligence, of hu- 
manness, and any uncertainty is devolution of mind, insanity, 
animalism.-^ 

Since pure truth, unprejudiced, simple, such as is the 
natural aspiration of the child, is the goal of education, 
what is the utility of speculations or of inquiries regard- 
ing history, science, social institutions ? Why consider 
the adult at all ? Why not turn society upside down ; 
and why not let the adults be organized in classes under 
the instruction of children.^ What a ridiculous sugges- 
tion ! Perhaps so. But let us consider for a moment 
some of the evils that would instantly be condemned, 
were young children lords of the world. Consider palaces, 
prisons, slums, murders, treasons, plots, lies of intent, 
double dealing, avarice. The adult mind, strong as it 
is, shrinks from the task : reason staggers and desists. 

^ Pratt, Psychology of Religious Belief. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 123 

But continue. Whom would the child select as ruler 
of all? Him or her let us make ruler in imagination. 
The fond mother, indubitably. And let us forecast the 
result. What a miracle of cleansing would be accom- 
plished ! Would crimes be punished as now ? Would 
money be idol and magic as now ? 

Read literature. Read political philosophy. Read so- 
ciology. Far less profitable suggestions have been made 
by very serious men than the suggestion of Jesus that 
we turn about and become as children. Mayhap, God 
spoke in that word. Mayhap, it is the method to make 
love rather than power or property the alembic of life, — 
of personal, of national, of world life. 

At any rate, whatsoever be the cost, I will not deny 
it : I will not explain it away : I will accept and use it. 
I, the adult, the father, the mother, am part and parcel 
of humanity, bridging from child to child as certainly, as 
humbly, as simply as once I, the child, bridged from 
adult to adult. Nor do I, grown out of the child, clearly 
know what part of me is child, what part adult. The 
child is, indeed, the father of the man ; but he is more, 
he is the essence of him, if he be really man. For the 
very qualities that we call "manly" are childlike, — 
sincerity, aspiration, love of truth, fair play, openness, 
loyalty. All heroes, all saints, preserved sacred the 
child in themselves. Uncalculating self-sacrifice, single- 
hearted goodness ; the child is incapable of intending 
anything else. 

And yet, and yet! Life is not for naught. Higher 
may the man rise than the child ; as certainly as that 
often, I fear usually, he sinks lower. He rises by being 
obedient to the heavenly visions of the child and by 
observing certain of the habits and tastes of the child. 
The versatility, the many-faceted activity, the sleep, the 
appetite, the very dislikes of the child, — do they not 
persevere in the man of genius ? And yet knowledge 



124 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

comes. To be good, it is necessary to be good for some- 
thing ; and what shall that something be ? The child 
cannot know. 

The career of many a man illustrates the principle. It was 
the aim of Demosthenes to become " a good speaker." When 
he became that, God sent him something to say. Many a 
poet has first learned the art of poesy ; after he had learned 
his art, he received his message.^ 

That the message comes undeniably as revelation, unsug- 
gested, unhistorical, may be sometimes an illusion ; but often 
it is really what it seems. Otherwise, by human knowledge, 
it becomes impossible to understand certain persons, some 
famous, some one's familiar neighbors."^ 

The School belongs to the child for the sake of the 
race. It belongs to the childlike, of whatever age, for 
the sake of the progress of the race in culture, in wealth, 
in worth. The School, therefore, belongs to the truth ; 
and the truth for the School is the kind that needs 
no apologists or defenders, no protectors or advocates. 
While it is perfectly true that the School prepares for 
*'life," and equally true that "life" (the world) contains 
Church, State, Business, nevertheless it is not the pur- 
pose of the School to prepare for the State or for the 
Church or for Business. Perhaps these institutions are 
needless or even wrong. It is quite possible that God 
reveals morality to the child, and that the sin of the 
adult alone occasions the need of religion ; ^ in which 
aspect the religious attitude is inferior to the moral in- 
tention. It is quite possible that business is a transitory 
degradation of the industrial arts. It is quite possible 
that government as such, as the rule of the bad and of 

1 For a curious confirmation of this in ordinary political life, see 
Steffens (in McChcre's Magazitte, February, 1906), " The Gentleman from 
Essex." 

2 Cf. Clemens (Mark Twain), yi^aw of Arc. 

3 Fichte, Critique of Religion. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 125 

the weak by the good and the strong, is necessary solely 
because education has not yet accomplished its perfect 
work. ^ 

But perhaps the statement that the School is wholly 
subordinate and dependent is challenged. 

Property, the oldest of all the social institutions, has 
nearly succeeded in shuffling off all responsibility for 
the School. Here and there a property school, living by 
endowments, independent of fees, controlled absolutely 
by educators (with no business men as trustees and, 
th eref ore, rulers) , may survive. I know of few such sch ools 
in the western world of Europe and America, and none 
of any importance. 

The Family still maintains its *' select " schools, mostly 
for girls. These are sometimes schools for small children, 
or "finishing schools" for girls. The object of the 
former kind of school is to relieve mothers of home care. 
The object of the latter kind is to furnish girls with 
" accomplishments," by means of which to win desirable 
husbands and to make attractive homes. In these latter 
years a peculiar kind of school of accomplishments has 
appeared, — the school for training in domestic science 
and art. A more familiar kind is the " boarding school " 
for boys or for girls. Such schools are the results of 
parental interest, and are to be credited to the ancient 
tradition that parents must either teach their children 
themselves or provide teachers for them. 

The management of these "private schools," as we 
Americans call them, whether endowed or not, is always 
in the interest of the "patrons " representing the Family. 
A school is "unsuccessful," and its principal "does not 
know the business," when, as very often happens, he 
does not make the school attractive to son or daughter 
and to father or mother. The family or private school, as a 

^ Such appears to be part of the meaning of Jefferson and others : 
" The least government is the best government." 



126 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

type, persists to this day. Most examples of the type are 
but short-lived. Occasionally, some academy with a rela- 
tively large endowment lasts for generations. The pri- 
vate school by its selectness appeals to the economic class 
whose members are dependent upon the workers for 
support, and to the class whose members have attained 
culture superior in form and in grace to that of the 
workers. The private school discriminates financially 
against the independent masses. Even when conscien- 
tiously and honorably "run," not for profit but as an 
educational enterprise, it must always, by necessity of 
character, aim to please parents as a class, though per- 
haps not as individuals. By common report, it must be 
pro-Family. The Family School, therefore, is typically 
subordinate to parents, and, unless endowed, is wholly 
dependent upon them,^ Some of its endowments may be 
derived from pleased parents. 

The Church is third in age as a social institution, and 
it holds many a school in its grasp. Indeed, in one of its 
forms, it holds an entire system of schools in its grasp. 
Moreover, of recent years, another form has under- 
taken to establish a similar system of schools. And the 
Church now maintains, as it has maintained for fifty 
centuries and more, training schools, "theological semi- 
naries," "schools for monks," "temples," affording pre- 
paration for the priesthood, ministry, and ceremonial 
service. 

This magnificent, world-wide, age-old system of the 
Church is far more philosophical, sociological, scientific, 
than appears. It conforms admirably with the laws of 
classes, variants, and masses of population. By this sys- 
tem, there is training for clergy and for laity upon differ- 
ent lines. But for the celibacy of one great priesthood, 
— a celibacy that, of course, wipes out the class in every 
generation, — the system would almost certainly have 

1 Cf. Adams, Sojne Famous American Schools, Introduction. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 127 

transformed the world. And yet, though absolutely pre- 
venting the scholarly class from becoming an hereditary 
caste, and wholly relying for that class upon the variants 
fKom the masses, the Roman Catholic Church has won 
and maintained a primacy in many nations and a power 
throughout all Christendom that can be accounted for 
only by the efficiency and by the completeness of its 
educational system.^ 

But this educational system is a mere part of the 
entire Catholic ecclesiastical system; and every day's 
work in every Catholic school, whether local primary 
or international graduate, is directed to one end, — the 
maintenance of Catholic Christianity. Schooling of such 
kind we may call education. Without doubt, it is educa- 
tion, for no boy could go through all its grades of school 
and college without enlargement of powers. Ten thou- 
sand, many million, bear witness that Catholic schooling 
is more than training and inculcating, for it is, in large 
measure, developing. And yet, once more, it is the 
achievement of a school wholly subordinate to and de- 
pendent upon a church. Appointments, compensation of 
teachers, fees of pupils (if any), rules, courses of study, 
text-books used, are all determined not by free educa- 
tors, but by priests. Or rather the bishop, the priest, is 
not wholly churchman, but is in part schoolman. In the 
Catholic world, the school has not yet completed its dif- 
ferentiation within the Church by separating from it and 
integrating itself outside of the Church. 

The persistence of the Catholic school has at least 
suggested, if not really stimulated, in America the es- 
tablishment of various schools under the protection and 
often the patronage of other churches. The power of 
these ecclesiastical parochial and boarding schools is 
limited only by their contributing population and by their 

^ O'Gorman, History of the Roman Catholic Church in the U. S., 
pp. 445, 489; Carroll, Religious Forces of the U. S., p. Ixvi. 



128 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

property. It is poverty, not policy, that prevents the 
religious school from being a vast influence in America. 
It is a chief agency of particular clergies for religious 
inculcation and propaganda.^ Education is subordinate, 
incidental, apparently accidental. 

Now comes Culture, with its splendid schools, — the 
university, the college, and the institute. In these 
schools, as compared with the schools of the Family and 
of the Church, the educators are free, yet not wholly so. 
For over the faculty is the board of trustees, holding the 
property, the purse, and the policy of the institution. 
This board of trustees is very, very seldom controlled 
by educators. It is usually composed of business men 
(merchants, manufacturers, publishers, bankers), lawyers, 
ministers, politicians, leisure-class men, capitalists. Some- 
times one who is only an author, a professor, an archi- 
tect, ajournaHst, an engineer, an educator, or a scientist, 
breaks into the circle, but never with any support ; and 
never an artist, a mechanic, or a musician is enrolled 
among them. Nevertheless, when no particular class or 
type is in full control, and when no particular patron, 
donor, or philanthropist determines the policy, such a 
board of trustees serves very well, being a microcosm 
of the world of men. Over the heterogeneous board, 
the educator-president, if he be not cleric disguised as 
culturist,^ or the professors of the faculty often have con- 
siderable influence. But a homogeneous board, harmo- 
nious, with an established policy, especially when its 
members have any leisure, is likely to invade the domain 

1 " Church schools for girls are a chief instrument of gaining and ex- 
tending church influence." Tiffany, History of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church in the U. S. of America, p. 507. 

2 Educators do well to consider carefully the policy of making the 
president of the college or university faculty also president of the board 
of trustees. Upon the personality and purpose of such a president de- 
pends the question whether by this twofold office, the faculty controls 
the trustees or the trustees control the faculty. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 129 

of the faculty and to alter opinions, even to enforce 
them, in matters alike of substance and of detail. 

It is in appearance only that educators control the 
higher institutions of learning. Indeed, as a matter of 
sociology, perhaps also of psychology, it is not desirable 
that at present they should control them.^ That control 
properly belongs, however, not to Property and Business, 
as it too often does now, but to Culture, and that not to 
Culture narrowly limited to philosophy, literature, his- 
tory, and science, but as including every knowledge and 
skill of any value to men,^ Freedom comes in the con- 
flicts of men and of ideas. 

What ? Should college professors help make invest- 
ments, expend money for buildings and maintenance, fix 
and pay salaries, decide courses of study ? Of course, 
they should. How else can they be men in a world of 
men ? How else can they be fitted themselves to fit 
youth to enter the world of men ? The Roman Catholic 
Church has survived professional control of finances, 
which is the essence of control, nearly two thousand 
years. Let us have complete integration, — Business for 
business men, Education for educators, Culture for men 
of culture, Cobbling for cobblers. 

But the running of a university is purely a business 
matter ! It should not be. A lot of scholastic, absent- 
minded, dreamy professors would soon waste the funds! 
Who cares most to preserve the funds ? Those who live 
by them, or those who are merely set to watch them ? 
The pros and cons run on. The tendency is clear, that 
Culture will yet come into its own, which is independence 

1 Cf. West, " The ' Faculty ' in American Universities," Edticatioial 
Review, June, 1906. 

2 I raise the question whether the trustees should not have absolute 
financial control and be all of them men of the highest culture. To 
secure such a board, alumni election of trustees with charter provision 
as to the eligibility of candidates seems to be progress in the right direc- 
tion. Cf. White, Autobiography, vol. i, pp. 342, 431. 



130 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

of everything that is not-culture. The fact is clear, 
however, that Culture is still in leading strings. Not less 
true is this of the public or State universities. What- 
ever be the mode by which the democracy enforces con- 
trol over these institutions, it is still control of Culture 
by the will of non-cultural society.^ 

The failure of Property, of Family, of Religion, and of 
Culture to provide universal education forced the con- 
stitutional State, for its own preservation, to take the 
School under its protection. By no means clearly under- 
standing the nature or the extent or the meaning of the 
enterprise, democratic government in America under- 
took general education in order to prevent illiteracy, 
inefficiency, and immorality from ruining the society in 
its control. The modern State is universal : every child 
is born into it. The State, therefore, upon adopting the 
School, decreed that it also should be universal : every 
child must accept its privileges.^ 

This modern State is historically a peculiar organization. 
No other universal institution, such as the Church once was 
everywhere in Western Europe, ever submitted to the control 
of the many, — that is, of the masses. Only a few Protest- 
ant churches, of course, none of them universal, are demo- 
cratic. The American State is apparently all society organized 
for government. The reality is that it is a transient majority 
of adult males organized for government, and usually so 
organized by masterful natural or hereditary aristocrats in 
their own interest.^ 

With an amazing rapidity that displayed the free 
energy of an age of legislatures, frequently in session, 
of newspapers, of telegraph, telephone, typewriter, steam 

^ For a discussion of the effect of the famous Dartmouth College case, 
in which the State was denied control over an educational corporation, 
see Brown, Making of our Middle Schools, pp. 289-291. 

2 Davidson, History of Education, p. 265. 

' "^x^z^, American Commonwealth, chapter \xx\v ; Wilson, The State^ 
chapter xiii. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 131 

and electric railroads, conveying men and ideas almost 
fluidly about the country, the American State created 
the American free public school.^ Like a parasite at the 
banquet of a Roman Senator, public education waits 
eagerly upon every act and upon every word of the 
American government. We may talk of " more money 
for the public schools," and we may gradually get more 
and more money ; but all the while the relation is essen- 
tially false. Substantively, education is a form, a mode of 
religion ; but it is in no proper sense a form or a mode 
of government. Better the dependence of the School 
upon the Church than upon the State. This is a transi- 
tion era ; and submerged in it, we are likely to mistake a 
tide for an ocean current. Education as a formal, univer- 
sal system will never return to the Family or to the 
Church ; and it will soon go free from the State. 

But what are the symptoms of this subordination and 
this dependence ? What are the indications of finally 
"reaching majority" and going free.? And what are 
some of the disagreeable complications in the State- 
School disease ? We hear much in history of the State- 
Church. What of this State-School .? What revolution is 
contained in the present ; and when the wheel of society 
revolves, will it revolve forward ? 

The enormous majority of children and youth who are 
subject to the State-School certainly warrants special 
consideration of these questions. 

Wherever the public school of the State exists, there 
it is absolutely controlled and in every respect directed 
by a political board of education. ^ The superintendent, if 
any there be, is chosen by that board. Courses of study, 
text-books, rules and regulations, generally appointments, 

^ For the characteristics of this school, see Chancellor, Our Schools: 
Their Adininistration and Supervision^ chapter viii. 

' Political, in distinction from cultural, ecclesiastical, and economic. 
We must redeem this noble word from its sinister connotations. 



132 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

transfers, discharges, and always salaries of teachers are 
determined by the board, or by some still higher legis- 
lative body acting as the will of the democracy. Who 
constitute the board ? Educators never.. Here and there 
some educator, retired or employed elsewhere but resi- 
dent in the municipality, may be a member of the board ; 
but the control is always in the political members. In- 
deed, the educator must be a political favorite in order 
to secure membership. 

So universal is the non-professional character of the 
board of education that the employed educators, as the 
product of their conditions, rejoice in serving men " who 
know nothing about education." It matters not whether 
the members of the board be chosen by election at 
large or by wards, or by appointment of mayor or judge : 
professional interest and equipment are practically a bar 
to office. Once upon the board, the member becomes 
infected with the tradition of all boards, that "Educators 
know nothing about money affairs." Immediately a 
double relation is established. The board members 
arrogate to themselves not only legal control and final 
authority, but also omniscience in every financial matter, 
while out of mere self-respect the educators sullenly 
retreat to their fortified schools and become a conspiracy 
against the board and against the superintendent, if 
he is " loyal " to his employers. Moreover, the board 
becomes characterized by all the traits of the master 
class and the teaching force by all those of the ser- 
vants, so that the public is disturbed beyond measure. 
Imagining that the teachers are what they purport to 
be, profess to be, and by the board itself are advertised 
to be, — that is, responsible for the education in the 
schools, — parents and citizens require or try to require 
them to produce results wholly beyond their opportu- 
nities and resources.^ 

1 Chancellor, Our Schools, p. 117. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 133 

The end is not yet. Enough generations of school- 
children have not yet come into the society of men, the 
society national and international, for anything like final 
testing. Too many of the failures of the public schools 
are regenerated by the colleges, or tinkered into shape 
by parents, employers, special schools, for the real truth 
to be positively known by even the enlightened general 
public. Despite every handicap, some pubhc schools 
are really educational agencies ; and their product is 
genuinely educated. But the fallacy of the system never- 
theless remains ; it is undeniable, and it is undenied by 
the truthful. Where State legislatures by laws for the 
public schools, or where boards of education by resolu- 
tions or tacit custom, delegate large powers to educators, 
there little harm results from the present transitional 
system ; but such discriminating legislators and such 
self-renouncing boards are few. 

Read the statutes of any State, read the rules and 
regulations of any municipality ; and the truth of the au- 
thority of the board as over against the school becomes 
at once apparent. And do not deny the truth of this 
statement before reading these laws and regulations. 

The influence of the vested legal powers of the board of 
education upon members is very instructive. In a certain 
city, a young man under twenty-six years of age, two of whose 
sisters were teachers in the local schools, came upon the board 
of education, pledged to certain reforms and vowing to support 
the teachers in their rights. He was confronted at the second 
meeting by a petition from the teachers, requesting that per- 
sonal matters of incompetence and of unsatisfactory service 
be discussed only in executive session and in the hearing of 
the accused. His remark, " It makes my blood boil to hear 
the insolence of these employees," told the story. He added, 
*' Human nature is human nature ; and I for one am going 
to use the power granted by the laws. Let them look out." 

The subordination of the School is shown in the 



134 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

finances. Almost everywhere, teachers are paid less than 
policemen and firemen. Almost everywhere, the school 
department is the last to receive funds. Almost every- 
where, the tendency is to employ more and more women 
and fewer men so as to save money and to secure em- 
ployees who will not "interfere in politics." In the vast 
recent prosperity of America, the teachers have no real 
share. Their wages have not risen as fast as the pur- 
chasing power of money has decreased. Schoolhouses 
do not improve generally in allowance of space per child 
and in amount of investment per child. Commonly, 
the tendency is to make the School a mere subsidiary 
department of the city or town government. Almost 
everywhere are to be found statutory limitations of the 
amounts per thousand dollars of taxable property or per 
child to be spent for educational purposes, though such 
limitations are set upon nothing else : as though we were 
in peril of being too well educated.^ 

Who are the persons chosen for board membership ? 
Characteristically, young men, lawyers or physicians de- 
sirous of advertising, or of "getting a start in politics," 
business men of minor importance, puppets of the "un- 
seen powers " that rule our municipalities. The respon- 
sible, successful men are few. Many superintendents 
feel that they can resist more effectively the clerk than 
the millionaire, and go so far as to advocate the policy 
of appointing or electing inferior men. 

Though the end is not yet, there are signs of change. 
Board membership is being lengthened in term, in the 
hope that long service will develop wisdom and prove to 
be a kind of education for educational control. Boards 
are being given, here and there, separate taxing powers 
in independence of city councils.^ Their ancient right of 

^ The proposed Constitution of the State of Oklahoma is only the latest 
striking example of the public distrust of education as worth all it costs. 
2 Cf. Colorado and New Jersey, 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 135 

holding buildings and lands in fee is in process of re- 
storation. Elections are held for board membership upon 
nominations by petition and on days other than those 
set apart for the partisan political elections.^ In a few 
instances, salaries are paid for services. In not a few- 
instances, boards are employing business managers and 
school architects, thus acknowledging ignorance of edu- 
cational construction. They are delegating many of their 
powers, such as choosing teachers and books, to profes- 
sional men. All these measures are remedies for a 
disease ; but they do not prevent the disease. The State- 
School is merely a transitory type. 

We have, therefore, the school that prepares girls for 
society and for marriage ; the school that teaches the 
masses to worship and the variants to conduct worship ; 
the school that inculcates certain kinds of knowledge ; 
and the school that is supposed to prepare for citizen- 
ship. This last, much lauded, common school of com- 
pulsory education has adopted the principle of Jesuit 
Catholic instruction, — Give us the child till twelve ; we 
can determine him for life by that time.^ To the State- 
School, all the meaning of adolescence is lost. Whereas, 
in fact, for boys the most important year for education 
is fourteen and for girls thirteen, the State-School allows 
its education to end there for the great majority.^ 

Business and Culture both discovered the lack. Cul- 
ture devised the old academy and the new high school 
for the supernormal variants from the masses. Business 
devised the commercial school or college. Its cry is 
" Education for practical life," meaning the life of the 
clerk or salesman or bookkeeper. Over the business 

^ Notably in the State of Colorado and in the city of St. Louis. 

^ See the statutes of every State enforcing compulsory education. A 
table is given in Dexter, History of Education in the U. S., Appendix I. 
See also Hughes, The Making of Citizens, pp. 134-136. 

2 Only I in 17 of persons in school and college in America in 1904 
was over fourteen years of age. 



136 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

school, Business presides mercilessly, and dictates pure 
training for the prescribed ends. Business is now 
reaching out to dictate courses and methods to the 
State high schools. It develops strong arguments for 
secondary (early adolescent age) schools of commerce. 
Its theory is not " man for the State," not '* man for the 
Church," but "man for Business." Thus, a department 
of Society arrogates to itself more than Society has ever 
claimed, — to subordinate the immortal soul to material 
wealth. 

And why not ? Why is it not best for the boy or girl to 
go to school and to acquire there a skill, or better, an art ^ 
whereby to support his or her physical life } Is not the 
economic activity the essence of humanity.-^ Must we not 
first have food, shelter, clothes, work-for-wages } Jesus 
did not think so ; ^ but the Master lived in the first cen- 
tury, in a land halfway around the world from us. His is 
"hard doctrine." Nevertheless, it seems to be wise as 
well as righteous, for the masters of business do not 
come from business schools. It is more important to 
educate than to train. Besides all this, it appears that 
Business itself is on trial. ^ The economic regime, that 
came in but two or three hundred years ago, new-founded 
upon the factories of the nineteenth century, is on trial.'* 
It may be that its prescriptions of rent, interest, taxes, 
profits, and insurance, which now worry so many stu- 
dents of arithmetic and practitioners of bookkeeping, 
will be as obsolete two or three hundred years hence as 

1 Plato in the Gorgias, § 45, tells us how to distinguish a skill from an 
art. Art has knowledge of the things that it employs, what they sever- 
ally are in their nature, and can tell the use of each. To teach a skill is 
merely to train, but to teach an art is to educate. 

- "Seek ye first the kingdom [of God] and His righteousness [justice], 
and all these things shall be added unto you [set at your side]." Mat- 
thew vi, 2,2,' " Man shall not Hve by bread alone." Matthew iv, 4. 

3 Ripley, Trusts, Pools, and Corporations. 

* Toynbee, The Industrial Revoliitio7i. 



SUBORDINATION OF THE SCHOOL 137 

feudal dues (fines of alienation, worships, reliefs) are now. 
It is not well to be too serious about typewriting : some 
day it may be as obsolete as hieroglyphics are now ; and 
as useless. 

Only thought lives. Only the soul is worth anxiety. 

Upon this analysis, which fails to discover a single 
system of schools whose sole purpose is the true purpose 
of education, it becomes obvious why the real school is 
so far from ideal. 

The desiderata of the ideal school are two : — 

The independence of a sufficient group of educators 
from all external control (save, of course, public opinion) ; 

Adequate grounds, buildings, apparatus, salaries, and 
other means of physical support. 

In other terms, freedom from authority, and authority 
in this freedom. 

The social forces that should and will produce a formal 
system of education competent to perform its obligations 
are five : — 

The police protection of society, for without the school 
civilization would soon go to wreck ; 

The desirability of material progress whose benefits 
may be so widely diffused that incurable moral delin- 
quency shall be the sole cause of poverty ; 

The neighborliness of humanity, seeking that all per- 
sons may be fit for companionship; 

The love of children and of youth, which means to 
help them to realize as much as possible of the good of 
life; and 

The spirit of modern scholarship, which desires all men 
to share in the heritage of human knowledge and skill. 

These forces conspire with the yearning of youth itself 
to grow, — a yearning that imprisons millions for hours 
a day in conditions often irksome and sometimes pain- 
ful, — to bring American society to the independent, 
properly supported School. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE NEW EDUCATION 

{a) ITS SCIENTIFIC BASIS. (5) ITS PURPOSES 

Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. — Milton, Prose Works, 
vol. ii, p. 92. 

The experimental method, qualitative and quantitative, is adequate to the whole struc- 
ture of mind. — Titchener, Experimental Psychology, Instructor'' s Manual, p. Ixvii. 

The aim of education is world-building, — the construction of such a world as shall 
furnish the man with motives to live an enlightened, kindly, helpful, and noble social life 
of continuous progress. — Dwi-DSon, History 0/ Education, p. 257. 

Every intelligent man guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order 
of Nature is constant and that the chain of natural causation is never broken. — Huxley, 
On Evolution, p. 2. 

From ancient Chaldea to modern America, the tale of 
progress is the tale of adding and separating, of approv- 
ing and discarding, the tale of change. Progress in edu- 
cation has been a tale of the new becoming the old, and 
of the old giving place to the new. In a sense, progress 
is mechanical. We may count its steps, concatenate 
them, mark the resting-places, measure the speed and 
the space of each march. But though the mechanism be 
perfectly clear, the spirit may still be hidden.^ 

No one has yet written the history of the methodology, the 
practice, the mechanism of education through the centuries, 
though many have written the history of educational theories 
with more or less comment upon methods and actual practice. 
Such a history of educational mechanics would be profitable 
as affording tests of modern schooUng. Nevertheless, the su- 
perior interest in theory has its entire justification, for "the 
letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."^ 

^ Structure, process, method, — each is mechanical, inevitably mechani- 
cal ; but reason, cause, spirit, — each is vital. Cf. Lotze, Microcosmus, p. 5 1. 
2 Paul, 2 Corinthians iii, 6. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 139 

Every change in mechanism is due to some change in 
the Hfe that is before or within the mechanism.^ Things 
are the products, the forms of thoughts. Laws, pro- 
cesses, plans are thoughts. It cannot be proven by any 
of the efforts of philosophy or of science that things are 
not thoughts ; and that mechanism itself is not a mode 
of spirit. All that we know is that things and thoughts 
are at least not incongruent and exclusive, for if they 
were, mind could never apprehend matter.^ 

The progress in thought has forced the progress in 
mechanism. Every cha^ige in thought is accompanied by, 
perhaps inevitably causes, a change in mechanism, — on 
the principle, it maybe, of the *' conservation of energy." 
The movements of population, its growths, its collisions, 
its combinations and wars ; the movements of ideas by 
the migrations of men and of books and by reports of 
speech ; the movements of wealth by invention, by com- 
merce, by fire and pillage ; the movements of thought and 
of art expressing thought (in a phrase, the mechanical 
process of society, which, in appearance at least, is pro- 
gress) : these have forced changes in the mechanism of 
education, which expresses the social spirit. This spirit of 
society, the time-spirit, has typical purposes in education, 
which necessarily characterize the school of the time. 

The schools of a particular age and country are seldom 
much better or worse than the generally prevailing culture. 
And the typical purpose of education is usually the typical pur- 
pose of the sovereign power in the society, which, of course, 
always resides in some ruling class or classes. 

The temper of the present age in America is demo- 
cratic, scientific, practical, mechanical, materialistic.^ It 

1 Function makes structure. Qi.VLOxgss^, Habits and Instincts ; Sonde- 
man, Frob/efns of Biology ; Darwin, Oi-igin of Species. 

2 Hoffding, The Problem of Philosophy., translated by Fisher, intro- 
duction by James. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, passim. 

8 Lloyd, " History and Materialism," Amer. Hist. Rev., July, 1905. 



140 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

is, therefore, out of harmony with the characteristic 
temper of historical education, which is aristocratic, un- 
scientific, impractical, religious in a formal sense, and 
imperfectly organic. There is not antithesis or antago- 
nism, for there are not mere points of common interest, 
but actual overlappings with resultant common grounds. 
Education has always been, in no small measure, formal 
and mechanical, the formalisms and mechanisms inter- 
fering, not slightly, with its essentially organic, vital, 
spiritual nature. The modern American social temper 
is, therefore, to be considered more out of harmony with 
true education than with historical education. And yet 
it may well be that education is to gain greatly from cer- 
tain qualities of our age : its will to freedom, if not also 
to equality, of opportunity, its scientific devotion, and 
its practical character. These will lead, undoubtedly are 
leading, to far greater diffusion of knowledge, to perfec- 
tion of the mechanism of education, and to its reality 
as a force and a life. 

The effort of modern education to diffuse knowledge 
more widely is thoroughly scientific in its results, if not 
in its methods. The diffusion of knowledge tends to ac- 
complish two ends that may be termed mechanical : to 
discover the variants among the masses and to equip 
them for lives of peculiar power and of large service ; 
and to teach to the masses the ways of culture and to 
orientate them in the world of social right and wrong. 
This democratization of education is wholly good as well 
as scientific and practical. 

The perfecting of the mechanism of education is also 
a thoroughly scientific enterprise. The workman is known 
by his tools, his methods, his skill : these prove his craft 
not less certainly than do his products. The selected 
teacher, the free and wide curriculum, the better book, 
the closer organization, the more complete equipment, 
the larger and finer building, the careful ventilation and 



THE NEW EDUCATION 141 

sanitation, the ample grounds; — all these testify to the 
art of the educational director. The very system is evi- 
dence, though not proof, of a science within its substance 
and determining its form. 

Is, then, education an art or a science? Socrates, as 
represented by Plato, considered teaching at least an art : 
and teaching is half of education. Modern philosophy 
accounts educating an art, but education a science. It is 
a subtle distinction. Art is an efficient mode or method 
of action resulting in a product of beauty.^ And beauty 
is a quality that whenever present pleases all of us.^ A 
science is a body, a whole, of systematized knowledge, 
composed upon understood principles that correlate 
clearly known facts ; while science is a mode or method 
of arriving at fact with certainty, that is, of finding 
truth. Art also has its concrete meaning, for an art is a 
body, a whole, of products of a particular kind of beauty. 

Pottery is an art, often styled ceramics. The making of 
pottery is an art. The mode and the product of beauty may 
be considered art. Similarly, the body of chemistry consti- 
tutes a science, while chemistry as a mode of investigating 
Nature, is a science. Both art and science may be used in 
either a kinetic or a static sense. 

As a formal system, education is on the v^ay to be- 
coming a science, while as a technical method educating 
(or to speak more loosely in the common fashion, edu- 
cation) is an applied science on the way to becoming 
an art. Now the art of education is pedagogy (or peda- 
gogics), which is not the subject of the present inquiry.^ 

1 To get the full meaning of this word, we must realize its history. 
Beauty is goodness. {Beau, homes, hellus.) A thing of beauty is good 
for us. This explains the apparent contradiction in the beautiful work 
of art that produces in us grief or fear or hate ; it is beautiful provided 
that in the circumstances grief or fear or hate is good for us or in us. 

2 Kant, Critique of Jiidgment. 

3 This subject is the science of education, or, to express the matter 



142 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

The artist-educator may be said to teach well ; the scien- 
tist-educator, to teach wisely. In the one case, we emphasize 
the good result or the prospect of it ; in the other, the 
method and the intelligence shown in the processes employed 
by the method. 

The science of education must be based upon other 
sciences, such as psychology, particularly the psychology 
of the feelings; genetic psychology; biogenetic psycho- 
logy ; physiology and physiological psychology ; anthro- 
pology ; pathology ; biology ; sociology ; criminology, 
far better to be styled sinology ; ^ and political economy. 

The essence of the whole matter is biology, the science 
of life, which reveals the origins of the animal body and 
of its various structures and functions. Thereby, man is 
interpreted to himself as a form of Nature, a form liter- 
ally akin to that of every other living creature. He who 
is not something of a biologist can never again be any- 
thing of a philosopher.^ Who can measure how much his 
primitive biology helped to make Aristotle ''The Phi- 
losopher," holding primacy for a thousand years ? ^ 

The whole matter of education, again, is ensphered in 
sociology, which accounts for thehumanness of the mind 
of modern man. By becoming a socius, the /tomo be- 
comes a vir. Out of the individual, companionship makes 
the person. Not for the sake of society, but for the sake 
of the boy and the girl, are they prepared for society. 

Yet the centre and the envelope do not complete the 
sphere, which finds -its substance in psychology, the 
science of the soul. This science, for man the most 

more fully, the motives and other forces that tend to the making of 
such a science, together with the materials that are being accumulated 
for the use of the science. 

^ Schmidt, Ethik der Alien Griechen. 

2 This was settled by Darwin, and has been expounded by Huxley, 
Spencer, Tyndall, Wallace, Fiske, De Vries, Drummond, and a hundred 
others. 

' Turner, History of Philosophy, p. 224 et passim . 



THE NEW EDUCATION i43 

significant of all sciences, has many fields of inquiry. 
The science of human nature must sound and map the 
innermost deeps as well as measure the surfaces and 
edges. It must begin, therefore, with motives.^ 

Every motive has a reason ^ because of which it exists; 
the persistence of the reason in unconsciousness pro- 
duces its evolution into motive and characterizes it as 
such. The cause of this persistence is an appreciative 
condition of that unconsciousness, —its apperceptive 
appropriateness, we may perhaps say, by analogy with 
the processes of consciousness. The reason within the 
motive is always an ideal. Every motive has also always 
a judgment regarding the ideal ; this judgme-nt is its 
valuation of the ideal ; and the integrity of the motive is 
always conditioned by this judgment. The force of the 
motive is conditioned by its adjustment to the general 
nature of the personal soul and by the force of that soul. 
Motive is in the depths of the man ; no man ever has 
a motive false to his real self, though it may be false to 
the self that he hopes to build.^ 

While every motive has an ideal within itself and a 
value for its ideal, not every ideal has a judgment of 
value as yet attached, and not every value awakens mo- 
tive. Ideals are upon the periphery of unconsciousness, 
motive is at its centre, value relates centre to circumfer- 
ence ; and the whole constitutes the entire circle of un- 
consciousness. It may seem, at first, a contradiction in 

1 "The substitution of the will as the world -principle instead of the 
reason has been of distinct service to us in the interpretation of expe- 
rience." Caldwell, Schopenhauer's System in its Philosophical Significance, 
p. 8. , 

2 Reason is unconscious ; its result, a judgment, is conscious ; its 
statement, an argument, is self-conscious. 

3 Sensation is the gateway of the psychophysical parallel : by it, the 
external world beyond the periphery of the body invades the soul. 
Motive is another gateway : by it, the external world within the peri- 
phery of the body invades the soul, — in short, bodily energy becomes 
or awakes psychic activity. 



144 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

terms to assert a psychology of unconsciousness ; yet 
we may know it by its manifested acts. 

Values give quality and substance (that is, power) to 
ideals, by transmitting to them the power of motive. A 
value, in this sense, is a judgment of the intellect, work- 
ing below the plane of consciousness ; an ideal is an as- 
piration of the heart ; a motive is a direction of the will. 
The value of an ideal is realized by the motive, which 
must be sufficient and appropriate. 

Ideals lend dignity to motives, the dignity of value. 
Without value, there is not motive, but pure impulse. In 
the senses of this relation, an ideal is a conception of 
the intellect, a motive is a feeling of the heart; and a 
value is a projection of the will. The ideal in a motive 
is embodied in the value, which must be sufficient and 
worthy. 

Motives produce energy in values, the pure energy of 
ideals. In this relation, a motive is a causation of the 
intellect ; a value is an affection of the heart ; and an 
ideal is a prevision of the will.^ 

As the imagination, the memory, the judgment, and 
reason itself, are no longer to be considered separate 
faculties of the mind, but facilities, functionings, modes 
of operation involving the whole mind, so intellection, 
volition, and emotion — consciousness, subconsciousness, 
and unconsciousness — are also to be considered as 
modes of operation involving the whole mind. The old 

1 Students of historical philosophy will recognize the first group of 
theses as derived from Kant, the second from Plato, and the third from 
Schopenhauer. Similarly, we may characterize the three departments of 
government: ( i) legislative as intellectual, executive as moral, and judicial 
as emotional; (2) legislative as moral, executive as emotional, and judi- 
cial as intellectual ; (3) legislative as emotional, executive as intellectual, 
and judicial as moral. The first is the doctrine of pure monarchy; the 
second that of pure aristocracy ; and the third that of pure democracy. 
Actual government tries to coalesce and to average all of these. Hart, 
Actual Government, chapter iii, § 18. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 145 

psychology of intellect, will, and heart was true, for all 
science is by definition truth ; but it comprehended only 
a few features, and those chiefly mechanical, of the 
truth at present known of the mind of man.^ 

As we need a psychology of habit as well as of mental 
acts ; as we need a psychology of subconsciousness as 
well as of consciousness ; and as we need a psychology 
of emotion and of volition as well as of intellection ; so 
also do we need a psychology of production and of crea- 
tion as well as of reception and of repetition. Our modern 
psychology is but the nucleus of the psychology that 
will be when we complete the sphere of our inquiry. 
The essence of the matter, of the entire matter as well 
as of this apparently paradoxical phase of ideals, values, 
and motives, is mental functioning whose second power 
as seen in culture^ is always productive, creative, and 
serviceable. 

When one knows something new, there are three kinds 
of uses to which one's mind puts the new knowledge. 
One use is to hold it in memory, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, as reserve knowledge, which functions in its sim- 
plest mode when reproduced in kind.^ A musician learns 
a nocturne : he plays it accurately. A second use is to 
hold the knowledge in memory, not as such, but in com- 
position with other similar knowledge. The new know- 
ledge functions in a more complex manner when the 
knower delivers it changed in form and perhaps in sub- 
stance, but true to its own essential nature. A musician 
learns many selections ; he plays an original composition 



Royce, Outlines of Psychology, Preface, p. viii. 



2 Pseudo -culture may always be distinguished from the genuine in 
that it is always critical, censorious, self-conscious, and never constructive. 

3 There enters here the question as to the value in education of mere 
repetition after the recollection is perfectly established. The new thought 
or activity is already established and has effected its result : the repeti- 
tion makes the net of routine. But repetition with new elements added 
widens the highroad of recollection, and may even solidify the roadbeds. 



146 



THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 



with echoes and overtones and the spirit of the original 
music. A third use is to acquire the knowledge, but to 
absorb it, making it part and parcel of one's own mental 
life. The new knowledge functions in a manner that does 
not permit of its representation as it was. A musician 
learns the science and art of music ; and becomes a poet 
or an orator or a physician, employing only the power 
that the music gave his intellect, his will, his soul. The 
knowledge functions simply and plainly ; or complexly 
and obscurely ; or occultly and vitally. The knower 
may learn or think or create because of what he knows. 
In the last case, his knowledge functions as education, 
as education pure, simple, and perfect.^ 



The Intellect 

e ^. ( Peripheral 
Sensation i ^ ^ , 
( Central 

Attention 

Perception 

Colligation 

Appreciation 

Idea 

Cognition 

Conception 

Recognition 

Recollection 

Memory 

Notion 

Assimilation 

Differentiation 

Judgment 

Understanding 

Imagination 

Fancy 

Reason 

Thought 

Docility 

Etc. 



The Feelings 
Pain 
Pleasure 
Emotion 
Passion 
Love 
Fear 
Hate 

Appreciation 
Like 
Dislike 
Affection 
Disaffection 
Sensitiveness 
Etc. 



The Will 

Instinct 

Tropism 

Initiative 

Imitation 

Opposition 

Impulse 

Conation 

Motive 

Purpose 

Habit 

Courage 

Fortitude 

Patience 

Persistence 

Recurrence 

Etc. 



1 This opinion should be discriminated from the 
opinion that a judgment trained for one class or 
character of facts is valid for all other classes or 
for any other class. This latter opinion has been 
successfully controverted. Bagley, The Educative 
Process^ chapter xiii. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 147 

These terms are not proposed as mutually exclusive or as 
in systematic order ; as complete or as necessary to complete- 
ness ; or finally as purely scientific ; but they are proposed 
as obviously convincing evidence that psychology is the sub- 
stance of the science of education. 

But pure or theoretical psychology is by no means all 
of the subject. Almost as important is physiological 
psychology, v^hich deals with the nervous system as the 
instrument of the mind. Closely allied with this is phy- 
siology itself, with the associated sciences of anatomy 
and of pathology. Subsumed under them all are genetic 
psychology and biogenetic or biological psychology. So 
vast is the range of these sciences, so incredibly vast 
their present content, and so exhausting to the imagina- 
tion their possible inquiries, that I hesitate to make any 
suggestions as to their meaning and as to their truth 
for education.^ And yet because this hesitation may be 
misunderstood or resented, I note a few topics. 

The physical and the psychical determinants of the limen 
of consciousness. 

The rate of physico-psychical action. 

The content of consciousness. 

Psychophysical parallelism. 

Motor and sensory diatheses. 

Nascent periods when interests first appear in the soul. 

The history of the animal soul. 

The animal body, from fish via true animal to man. 

1 The results of education may be stated in the terms of physiological 
psychology. 

1. The psychophysical rate is increased: the educated man thinks 
faster than before. 

2. The field of consciousness at each instant is enlarged: he judges 
by means of more facts. 

3. Attention is more positively central: he "sees " more clearly. 

4. Recollection is heightened and deepened in tone ; and desire en- 
forces prompter and surer recall : he remembers better. 

5. The peripheral or penumbral subconsciousness is within partial 
control : he thinks, in a measure, of what he chooses to think. 



148 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

Defects of the special senses : vision and muscular accom- 
modation of eye ; deafness ; etc. 

Spinal curvature. 

Psychoses. 

Neuroses. 

Normal and abnormal rates of growth : genetic physiology. 

Anthropometry. 

Gymnastics ; athletics ; play ; games. 

Feeblemindedness : idiocy, imbecility, etc. 

Cretinism, epilepsy, chorea, etc. 

Arrests of development. 

Genius, precocity, belatedness, etc. 

Ontogeny and phylogeny. 

Food in physiology and in psychology. 

Obsession, paranoia, melancholia, etc. 

Narcotics and stimulants. 

Localizations of functions. 

Sex development, puberty, adolescence. 

Periodicity. 

Conversion, regeneration, etc. 

Heredity, environment, etc. 

Race. 

Sense-memory. 

The intellectual, volitional, and emotional elements in sen- 
sation. 

Corporal punishment. 

The minds of various animals. 

Cross heredity ; masculine woman ; bisexed mind ; etc. 

True and space senses ; other special senses. 

Fatigue.^ 

Closely related, of course, to psychology and to physi- 
ology is pathology, to which an entire profession devotes 
itself. It is a question whether a person who has never 

^ See the files of Pedagogical Seminary and oi Journal of Psychology; 
Adolescence: its Psychology; bibliographies, in Educational Review; 
Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology ; etc. A thousand 
other titles seem quite as important, though perhaps not quite so near 
the beginning of these sciences. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 149 

experienced a pathological state has fully entered into 
the life of civilized humanity ; and for two reasons. Of 
these, the first is that the perfectly healthy man is one 
whose mind has never overcome and exhausted his body; 
whereas, until such reduction of the body to the mind, 
certain states of consciousness that teach man his na- 
ture are never realized. Perfect health knows neither 
ecstasy nor exhaustion, both clearly pathological states, 
that build echoing halls in the soul. The second reason 
is that one knows his fellows only through a sympathy 
that comprehends from experience. Never to be ill, 
never to be wounded, never to be weak, never to be ex- 
cited or too weary for hunger or for sleep, never to be 
face to face with death, never to know pain, is never to 
feel the common emotions of humanity, and, therefore, 
would seem to be isolation from humanity.^ Taking life 
as a school (and what else is it .?), one might also be jus- 
tified in looking upon disease and the causes and condi- 
tions of disease as among the privileges of humanity. 
To the animal, a serious disease means death ; to the 
man, environed by knowledge and skill, it means educa- 
tion. Sickness has bound more persons together in com- 
mon affection than all other causes for sympathy taken 
together. Moreover, it has taught men more of Nature 
than all other agencies taken together. The chief motive 
in science is the desire to know the causes of disease. 
Pathology is the heart of all sciences. Pain is the 
mother of progress.'^ 

Closely related to pathology is criminology, broadly 
defined. Unfortunately, crime is partly an artificial mat- 
ter, a thing of definition, of tradition, of custom, rather 
than of reason, for a crime is a deed supposed to be 

^ Nietzsche, Uebermensch. 

^ Pain is the original sense. Wundt, Human and Animal Psycho- 
logy, pp. 223-232. Its recollection causes fear, which forces improvement. 
Darwin, Origin of Species, chapter viii. 



ISO THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

both a sin and a sanction/ a deed at once wrong and for- 
bidden. A sin, morally, is a deed of harm to one's self 
or to one's neighbors, an act of injury, an evidence of 
malice. A crime is a deed against the law as expressed 
by government. 2 Were government perfectly intelli- 
gent and perfectly righteous, every crime would be a 
sin; and whatever sin was sufficiently injurious to one's 
self or to one's neighbors to threaten the welfare of 
society would be a crime ; and nothing else would be. 
But because there are some crimes not essentially sinful, 
and many sins not legally recognized as criminal ; there- 
fore, crime is partly an artificial and partly a defective 
matter. And yet criminology, the science of the preven- 
tion and cure of crime, is a subject of no slight importance 
not only to statesmen, but also to educators, because if all 
educators understood perfectly how to educate, the sins 
that are crimes would never be committed, for there would 
be no sinners, and the crimes that are not-sins would 
be erased from the statute books. Then all lawmakers 
would be moralists ; and no moralist can tolerate the 
notion of forbidding and punishing as a crime any act 
that is not dangerous to one's self or to one's fellows. 

Criminology stands to education in much the same 
relation as that in which pathology stands to medicine ; 
for as the essence of medicine is hygiene, so the essence 
of education is conduct.^ The pathological state is the 
result of unhygienic living or conditions, while the crimi- 
nal state is the result of a soul or of an environment that 
knows not education. Only the uneducated are criminal ? 
Not that. There are criminals whose deeds were not sins. 
Only the uneducated are sinful } Not that. But only the 
incompletely educated are sinful, for the very commission 

* Bouvier, Law Dictionary ; also, files of Penology, especially Collins, 
1891, pp. 27-29, and Wey, 1891, pp. 57-69. 

2 Holmes, Common Law, pp. 49, 50. 

3 Royce, Outlines of Psychology, chapter xv. 



I 



THE NEW EDUCATION 151 

of sin is evidence of the incompletely evolved soul* 
Exactly as a man who is perfectly well and entirely iso- 
lated from infection is certain not to develop disease, so 
the man who is perfectly educated and entirely isolated 
from ignorance (or from the ignorant) will not develop 
sin. Of course, such a proposition requires a special de- 
finition of education, the definition to which this entire 
book is devoted. 

On two grounds, the double question is sometimes asked 
whether ignorant or uneducated persons can be moral or any- 
thing but moral. In Romans, Paul argued upon one line 
in answer. A perfectly ignorant man with a mind of normal 
powers is impossible. Only the idiot is perfectly ignorant, 
thought-proof. Ignorance, therefore, requires definition. This 
much is certain : the man who knows nothing in the premises 
cannot be guilty because he is not malicious, but no more is 
he righteous, for he cannot be making a choice between right 
and wrong. All one's knowledge lies within the range of 
his morality. A child cannot steal. A boy legislator cannot 
betray the public welfare. The conscript soldier, firing in his 
squad, does not commit murder. Taking, voting, shooting, — 
whether in ignorance or under duress ; whether mechanical 
or spontaneous or superstitious, — if without understanding, 
cannot be sins. The illiterate heir to an estate who signed a 
paper giving away the title was not generous. The childless 
uncle who at his death left his fortune to his nephews de- 
served no gratitude. The intention, which is conditioned by 
knowledge, makes the deed good or evil.'' 

The sinner precedes or commits the crime. The func- 
tions of criminology, therefore, are three : to discrimi- 
nate among crimes the sins and the not-sins, to prevent 
sins, and to reform sinners. The criminologist owes it 
to humanity to persuade the State to abolish all crimes 
that are not-sins ; he should study the causes of sin that 

1 Beecher, The Conflict of Ages, pp. 36, 37. 

' This is the familiar point of agreement between the law of the land 
and the ethics of the schools. 



152 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

lie in the conditions of society as well as those that lie 
in the nature of the sinner, and should persuade the 
State to remedy those conditions ; and he should study 
the sinful and the methods of reforming them. 

The criminologists, however, are few ; and criminology 
is but in its beginnings as a science. The evaluations of 
sins are often absurd,^ while the punishments, if any, are 
often scarcely less absurd. Every criminologist should 
be fundamentally an educator. The science of education 
must have criminology as one of its foundations ; or, to 
speak conversely, criminology is, in greatest portion, but 
a department of education. 

We educate, or rather train (or, shall I say, instruct) 
for the routine of life ; and the educated like the unedu- 
cated fail, seem ever to fail, in times of crisis. It is a mat- 
ter of familiar knowledge that skilled mechanics and men 
or women, who are manually, that is, organically, edu- 
cated, are never to be found in penitentiaries or jails. 
The graduate of the professional school, the graduate of 
the college, the banker, the merchant, the clerk, the hotel- 
keeper, the bar-tender, the laborer, the foreigner, and 
even the farmer : all these are to be found among the 
criminals, for they may become criminals. But almost no 
mechanics and almost no mothers are ever to be found 
within prison-walls. Why are these facts what they are ? 

Consider the greater sins, forgetting which of them are 
crimes. These are treachery, lying, stealing, fornicating, 

^ " The underpaid labor, the prolonged and groveling drudgery, the 
wasted strength, and misery and squalor, the diseases resulting, and the 
premature deaths that would be prevented by a just distribution of 
the products of labor, would in a single year outweigh all the so-called 
crime of a century, for the prevention of which, it is said, government 
alone exists. This ignoring of great evils that constitute civilized society 
a vast theatre of woe, while so violently striking at small evils, is the 
mark of an effete civilization, and warns us of the approaching dotage 
of the race." Ward, Psychic Factors of Civilization, p. 32©. Cf. Ross, 
"The Criminaloid," Atlajitic Monthly, January, 1907. 



\ 



THE NEW EDUCATION 153 

bribing, assault, destroying. All are characterized by 
getting something for less than its value, by perverting 
something from its natural function, or by sheer animal 
violence ; and they may all be resolved into ecstasies of 
body or of soul or of both ; whereas soul and body should 
be harmonious. These ecstasies consist in forgetting 
one's self or one's neighbors and in giving way to cen- 
trally excited sensations or feelings or desires in wanton 
disregard of results.^ 

A thousand crises must be faced in an active life. 
The wise and righteous man passes every crisis success- 
fully and becomes a master of men : or he may have failed 
in some crises, only to learn from his failures and to 
pass later crises successfully. Of course, most men start 
with handicaps, it may be of body or of family, of hered- 
ity or of environment. But the race is not always to the 
swift or the battle always to the strong.^ The worst 
handicaps are propensities to sins : yet these are the 
handicaps most neglected by the secular education of the 
times, which persistently forgets the inferior many and 
theorizes too much about the superior few. 

Now become plain the two reasons why skilled me- 
chanics and devoted mothers are almost immune to sins 
so bad as to constitute crimes : the mechanic by reason 
of his art or craft has learned, has become habituated 
to, physical self-control, is almost incapable of ecstasy, 
cannot forget himself ; while the mother by reason of 
housework, of maternity, of care of husband and chil- 
dren, has become habituated to equal self-control, is also 
incapable of any ecstasy save that of forgetting herself 
through devotion to others. Sin can find no material in 

1 A peripheral sensation may have been the occasion of the central 
excitement; but the complete disturbance, the overthrow of the psychi- 
cal equilibrium, is due to the presence in the soul of old memories, ances- 
tral tropisms, hitherto estabhshed dispositions that cause the whole being 
to vibrate and oscillate in irrational tumult. 

2 Cf. Ecclesiastes \x, 11. 



154 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

mechanics or mothers, who have learned real values 
in terms of labor and of interest and who have little 
time or energy for desiring something for nothing. 
Sin tempts mechanics and mothers and such as they 
are chiefly in the form of intoxicants to tide them 
over periods of undue weariness. He whom a rational 
art and poverty combine to master is safe against his 
own wantonness and the powers of this world. Convert, 
therefore, thy ambition into art and thy wealth into 
tools and thyself into a servant of many : for this is the 
highway to the kingdom of God, which is joy, peace, 
love in the secret recesses of the soul. 

Another science of vast importance to education 
would be political economy, but a pseudo-science con- 
tinues to masquerade under that name. The true poli- 
tical economy deals with the management of the wealth 
of the State as a domestic concern.^ Blind natural law is 
repudiated by sound political economy, as it is by every- 
thing else that is sane and civilized. Moreover, a sane 
political economy recognizes that in modern days we do 
not deal in wealth-as-such, but in property-in-wealth, 
not in goods free, but in goods owned, that is, in goods 
conditioned by public and private law. 

The fundamental assumption of modern, current poli- 
tical economy is this : '* The starting-point in all human 
activity is the existence of wants." ^ This is, of course, 
a fallacy, for a want implies a power to want. This is 
a priori truth. A posteriori, we know that all human 
activity in fact is the result of powers. To apply the 
Aristotelian test, — who wants most t The sickest man. 
Who is least active } He who is most ill. Again, who is 
most active } The man of greatest power. A similar 

1 Political economy, irhXis = city (State) ; oUos = household ; yS/xos = 
order. Cf . Ruskin, Unfo this Last ; Fors Clavigera. 

2 Seligman, Principles of Economic Sy chapter i, p. 3. An exposition of 
great ability, exactly wrong. 



THE NEW EDUCATION IS5 

analysis shows that not labor as such, but power or en- 
ergy developed as skill, produces the typical modern 
forms of abundant wealth.^ 

The present common economic analysis gives the 
distribution of wealth to land, to capital, to labor, to 
management, to insurance, and to government. Every 
educator should understand and should teach his boys 
and girls, his youth and maidens, to understand rent, 
interest, wages, profits, premiums, and taxes. Moreover, 
he should understand real values and money prices, 
competition and cooperation, and the incidence of laws. 
Lastly, he should understand poverty, luxury, and popu- 
lation laws. 

He who does understand these elementary matters 
will be an advocate of qualification tests for legislators 
not less drastic than those for physicians. The body 
politic is the prey to quacks and scoundrels: between 
the knaves and the fools, the public is beginning to per- 
ish. This is the way of all civilizations. God seems not 
yet to reveal to men how to produce enough good and 
wise rulers to lead any people forever forward. His will 
appears to design historic cycles rather than marches. ^ 

Upon this analysis, the scientific elements for the new 
science of education are disclosed. But has the science 
of sciences, philosophy, nothing to contribute .? Has his- 
tory nothing.? Has literature nothing.? Have the arts 
nothing .? Vast stores of facts ; elevating ideals ; warn- 
ings ; a high hope for the race ; pleasures, emotions, 
leisure, beauty. These are their contributions of mate- 
rials to education. Has religion nothing.? Education is 
the main trunk of religion. And what of all lesser 
knowledges and skills .? Materials, suggestions, devices. 

1 Per contra, George, Progress and Poverty. A new science will ap- 
pear bearing to economics the same relation that astronomy bears to 
astrology. Cf. Patten, New Basis of Civilization, chapter v. 

2 Bryce, American Commonwealth, chapters viii, Iviii. 



IS6 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

The conclusion is that education is something substan- 
tial, integral, no mere congeries of borrowed ideas. 

Its individual nature and character as a science will 
appear upon a consideration of the normal or typical 
progress of the child to the old man. What is the course ? 

The newborn babe is slow to discover the world, whose 
light dawns upon him very gradually. What his first 
consciousness was, no human being as yet has remem- 
bered. It maybe from the peripherally excited sensation 
of the change of temperature from the womb to the 
world ; it may be that of the change from darkness to 
light; it- may be the pain of birth; and it may be that 
even the foetus or the embryo has consciousness. Quite 
possibly, consciousness is transmitted as part of the 
heritage with ovum and sperm. ^ After birth, however, 
the opportunities and the materials of consciousness are 
multiplied. By discovering the world, the babe discovers 
himself : he discovers this self not as body, but as spirit, 
which, as he differentiates and integrates it, becomes to 
child and man his soul — his ego. After this discovery, 
he is aware, upon certain occasions and in certain con- 
ditions, of himself as spectator and critic of his conscious- 
ness. 

The little child discovers himself through his senses, 
but learns even the locations, not to say the functions, 
of his senses, general and special, long afterwards, if 
at all. He feels property in himself, his body, its parts. 
Things useful to him become his own like his body. 
The property-sense is the first mental activity that is 
above sensation and attention. Perception is making an 
idea one's own, that is, one's property. The familiar, the 

^ Angell and Thompson, " Organic Processes and Consciousness," 
Psychol. Review, vi, 1899, PP- 32-69. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution, 
passim. Hall, Evolution of Consciousness. Baldwin and Cattell, "Con- 
sciousness and Evolution," Science, ii, 1895, pp. 219-222, 271-272. 
Cope, " Consciousness in Evolution," Penn. Monthly, vi, 1876, pp. 560- 
575- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 157 

understood, thing becomes proper to one : with it, one is at 
home. Along with this property-sense grows a more im- 
portant sense of the use and function of the bodily parts 
and organs : a sense not analytic but synthetic, a sense 
of power accompanied by a desire for skill. To state this 
double matter otherwise : the soul is forthstepping to 
conquer the world and to possess it, and therefore takes 
wealth as property and exercises itself in and through 
its body for propriety. Thus acquisition and skill pro- 
ceed almost pari passiiy for a time. 

Before the consciousness of possessing a body to be 
trained is fully established, the desirability of knowing 
the world remote from hand and ear and eye begins to 
stir in the soul. Such is the beginning of the search into 
Nature, a search seldom abated voluntarily while life 
lasts. To possess things, to control one's body, to know 
the real world : these mark the limits of the activities of 
many men. To these, all matters of religion, of family, 
of politics, of society, of business, are but tributary, — 
important, if serviceable, but otherwise incidental and 
often objectionable. In truth, unless deliberately edu- 
cated by others, most human beings cannot compass 
more than these notions and functions of property, of 
the body, and of the physical world. 

The next stage in psychical growth is that of return 
to one's self, to inquire into the real self. This leads to 
the discovery of soul and body, — but words to most 
persons. Their differentiation and recognition as inter- 
related but not causally connected integral things, the 
healthful body being a good servant and the unhealthful 
a bad master, the vigorous soul respecting but regulating, 
even ruling the body, are events of major importance 
in the course of a complete education. To know one's 
own body, one must know biology, zoology, physiology, 
histology, physics, chemistry, mechanics : to know one's 
own soul, one must know philosophy, history, literature. 



158 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

religion, morality, government, psychology; for this is 
science, to connect one thing with everything else/ 
Thereby consciousness passes into self-consciousness.^ 

Now arises a new and higher self-control, the earlier 
being physical, this being psychical. Beyond self-know- 
ledge and self-control lies self-direction. Once more the 
individual must pass beyond and outside of himself to 
know the world. Now he must know the world of human 
society so well, and must trust himself so thoroughly in 
it, as to will for himself his course of action in it. Such 
an individual is rare, indeed. 

And yet even now his education is not complete. The 
self-directing individual who can overcome society at 
least to the extent of forcing his own way in it may grow 
into the man of social control. Such a man takes the 
world as his own and overcomes it. He has learned to 
think not only for himself and for his own, but for most 
other persons as community and as society. He becomes 
a popular demigod or a national hero. 

Higher yet may a man rise by this zigzagging between 
world and self, object and subject. He may absorb the 
world into his own heart and yearn over it as a mother 
over a child, loving the world better than himself, listen- 
ing to its needs, trying to help humanity bear its burdens 
and redeem its life. Such a man is incomprehensible to 
all other men than those of his own measure and nature.^ 

Consciousness is the first evidence of psychical pro- 
gress : to possess it is a fundamental necessity without 

* Miinsterberg, Principles of Art Education^ p. 16 et passim. 

2 Self-conscioasness is the evidence of the soul, which can never see 
itself, or know its locus, or foresee its destiny. The discontinuity of self- 
consciousness — far more clear and complete than the discontinuity of 
consciousness — appears as a mode of recurrence of the soul in the 
fashion of a tenant absent at times upon other business incommunicable 
through the present body. 

3 Urban, " The Individual and the Social Value Series," Philosophi- 
cal Review., xi, 1900. Chancellor, Our Schools., p. 310. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 159 

which goodness and intelligence are meaningless as 
terms of human morals and mental activity. 

The second stage is sense-knowledge, which gives at 
once property-in- things and property-in-self. He is good 
who treats himself well and preserves his own property ; 
and he is intelligent who knows how to get and how to 
keep property and how to use his own body for pleasure 
and profit. Of one who is in this stage and incapable of 
going higher, selfishness must not be predicated as sin- 
fulness, or self-gratification as ignorant narrowness of 
mind. Children of ten years of age are entirely justified 
in delighting in possessions and in practicing their bodily 
powers in games and in drills. 

The third stage is knowledge of the world of sense. 
To be good in this stage is to enjoy the delights of sense 
without surrendering to them. These delights are many, 
and they tend to feed and to develop the " lust of the 
eye " and the "pride of life." ^ Covetousness of property 
sets in, because much property enables one directly and in- 
directly to gratify the senses.^ Sins flaunt their pleasures 
before one. The senses plead for gratification. Taste 
calls for wine, and hearing for music ; sight calls for 
jewels, and smell for attar of roses ; touch calls for silks, 
and temperature for perpetual summer ; the muscles cry 
for play and for leisure, and sex for its ecstasy ; pride calls 
for the powers of property, and vaunts itself above the 
poorer; and all together demand money, which in this 
age short-circuits to all sense-delights. To escape social 
restraints, one travels, indulging among strangers the 
sense-activities that seem vices among friends. Then 
result thievery, adultery, drunkenness, arson, murder, 

^ John, I Epistle ii, 16. 

2 Covetousness is an arrest of development in the property-age of 
childhood. Avarice is an arrest in the next later period. " The covetous 
person is always drunken, day and night, watching and sleeping." Saint 
Augustine, Homilies, p. 232. 



l6o THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

and betrayals of every kind. He is good who yields to 
none of these temptations. He is intelligent who uses 
every sense as a tool for knowledge and for service. 

Vast as is the world opened to us by the senses, it is 
small and trivial compared with the world of the higher 
stage of the soul. He is good in this fourth stage who 
does everything in love of himself and of his neighbor, 
conceiving that I and my neighbor are upon a journey 
that is never to end.^ And he is intelligent who so orders 
his days and his acts that all contribute to permanent 
good, to enduring welfare of one's self and of one's 
neighbors. This, of course, is obvious ; and yet it is 
possible to enter upon this stage of knowledge of body 
and soul and to sin there far more terribly than in any 
earlier stage of development. Many have betrayed their 
own souls.^ So high is this stage that the State scarcely 
attempts to punish such sins as crimes. There are trea- 
sons against society organized as the State more horrid 
than to furnish news or supplies to an enemy in war. 
These are the treasons that rot society, poisoning the 
fountain-head of social justice. It is the kind of sin that 
to Dante seemed most awful.^ To. make righteousness a 

^ The most effective sermon that I ever heard was preached in Provi- 
dence about the year 1888 by the Rev. Dr. Alexander Mackenzie of 
Cambridge upon the eternal life. At its climax, he said that David had 
asked for a long life, for threescore years and ten. It is glorious to live 
out one's life for seventy years. But why not plan for seventy thousand 
years ? "Why not plan to live throughout eternity ? Cf. Royce, The Im- 
plications of Self-consciousness ; The World arid the Individual; both 
passim. Also, James, Human Ijnmortality. 

^ I remember with peculiar vividness a conversation with President 
Julius H. Seelye of Amherst, who said that of all the mysteries of life, 
the most mysterious to him was that God established a reasonable being 
who could yet act unreasonably. He considered sin of this character 
evidence of free will. 

3 In his age, this took the form of '* the simony of the Popes." One of 
its worst modern forms is the manufacture of public opinion by news- 
paper accounts that build up fictions into the verisimilitude of facts and 
thereby deceive even the elect. 



THE NEW EDUCATION i6i 

mock, to pollute the intelligence of man, woman, child, 
community, nation, to teach vileness as evidence of 
smartness : these have been the ambition of some, whose 
names are unfit for these pages. 

The fifth stage is yet higher. Few have ever attained 
it. To become self-directed in the world, to know the 
time-spirit and to work freely with it or against it, — this 
is beyond the limits of the minds of nearly all men. But 
what is it for the self-directing man to be good ? This : 
never to secure one's own end at any cost to another. 
And what is it to be intelligent ? To know how to secure 
one's own end. He, therefore, who is both wise and 
good, the self-directing man of intelligence and of per- 
sonal and social morality, secures his own ends without 
injury to others. Only the genius, only a few among 
geniuses, can accomplish this. The rest make a wreck 
of those about them. 

Yet higher is social control. He is good who sets the 
world about him to the work of its own development, and 
he is intelligent who so directs that work as to produce 
prosperity among his people. And he is evil who sets 
the world to do work for himself ; and he foolish who 
fails finally in his effort. Napoleon lived in this stage of 
personal evolution ; and failed because he was mainly 
bad and became foolish. Washington succeeded in this 
stage. 

The imagination of man compasses yet one higher 
stage, comprehension of the world-spirit, relating it to 
the time-spirit, and interpreting it by the personal spirit. 
This stage includes every other, includes social direction, 
self-direction, knowledge of body and soul, sense-know- 
ledge, physical skill, property in things and in one's own 
body and consciousness. Plato and Socrates failed to 
attain this stage, the one lacking self-surrender and the 
other social mastery. Lincoln failed to attain it, lacking 
but one grace. 



l62 THE MACHINERY. OF EDUCATION 

The Gospel story of Jesus Christ, which upon internal 
evidence appears to be defective as well as erroneous, 
nevertheless reveals the ideal person and, therefore, 
the redeemer of mankind. According to the story, the 
Master passed through every stage and through nearly 
every experience in every stage until He attained the 
highest. As a boy. He was taken down into Egypt, an 
experience of travel and sojourn very useful in securing 
self-alienation. Later, He acquired a manual art. Though 
forced into early self-consciousness by his experience 
with the doctors in the Temple at Jerusalem, He re- 
mained obedient to his parents throughout adolescence. 
Whether the story of the temptation in the wilderness 
by the devil be allegorical or historical, what it displays 
is that Jesus became conscious that a man of his powers 
might master the world. Later, his followers desired 
to make Him King, but what He had already renounced 
as a matter of securing by force of ability He again 
renounced even as a matter of receiving by social favor. 
By preaching, by teaching, and by healing. He had set 
the beginnings of a new order among men. Meantime, 
He had consorted with publicans and harlots and had 
been tempted by every pleasure of the senses, yet had 
overcome. Finally, though well aware that He might 
escape by deceit or by flight or by an army of angels, 
He submitted to an illegal and unjust sentence and 
accepted an ignominious death on the cross rather than 
set a whole world in chaos. Like Socrates, Jesus had 
lived by the laws of his country and therefore would 
die by them. Such, in outline, is the record of the only 
sinless man who achieved social power. Buddha almost 
attained ; perhaps he did in reality. But for most men 
such an end, indeed, any end is a horror, for we have not 
achieved the victory over death. To achieve this, it is 
necessary to learn the world-spirit, which involves pro- 
ceeding consciously from stage to stage up the long way 



THE NEW EDUCATION 163 

to world-understanding through self-renunciation. God 
Himself has naught to gain by all his labors through 
all the eternities and all the infinities. As far as we know 
or can understand, He is the Alpha and the Omega ; 
and his beginning is as his end. 

" Behold, thy God sublime. 
Through agonies of Time, 
In silence and alone, 
The King without a crown, 
Unchanged throughout all change, 
The infinitely strange. 
Forever gives and' gives. 
And by His giving lives." ^ 

What, then, are the purposes of education } Consid- 
ered scientifically and considered philosophically, they 
are the same. Whether for men or for women, they are 
the same. Whether for the children of the rich and 
of the wise, or for those of the poor and of the ignorant, 
they are the same. As far as he has capacity, the indi- 
vidual must repeat those stages in the history of the 
race which saw progress in social welfare, and should 
attempt those stages in the histories of the good and 
intelligent individuals which lie within the compass of 
his developing powers. By recapitulating the social and 
the personal processes, formal education proposes to de- 
velop as much as possible as many individuals as possible. 

And the fundamental motive in education is to bring 
man, the race, into harmony with the will of God for the 
men and women of this world. One who realizes this 
motive has found '' the mystery of eternity present at 
every hour of time." ^ 

^ Brook, Ve Cannot Come. 

2 Martineau, Essays, vol. ii, p. 46. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 

So lost are we to all genetic perspective in education, in opening everything intellectual 
to everybody, with no reference to stages of development or grades of ability, that it is 
high time to remember that youth have a certain fion possumus that it is dangerous longer 
to ignore. — Hall, Adolescence ; its Psychology, etc., vol ii, p. 540. 

The really essential point is the independence of the school. Whenever a school is con- 
sidered preparatory, it suffers. No school is subordinate to another school ; each school, 
college or university has its own life to live, and its own mission to fulfill, and that is to 
do its best for the development of the pupil during those years in which he is placed in its 
charge ; and this mission is best fulfilled by disregarding everything else than the good of 
the child. Let no power on earth come between the child and childhood. — Hughes, The 
Making of Citizens, p. 279. 

We may classify the materials employed by the formal 
system of education under three heads, — the humani- 
ties, the sciences, and the arts. And we may classify the 
exercises under three heads^ — study, recitation, and 
physical work. 

The humanities are those subjects by which humanity 
has expressed unsystematically and informally its know- 
ledge of its own life, its aspirations, its reflections, its 
society, its customs, its morals. Literature and language, 
grammar and rhetoric, philosophy and history, and what- 
ever is subordinate to them or is wholly composed of 
them, belong to the humanities. 

The sciences are those subjects by which humanity 
has expressed its knowledge of the world beyond human- 
ity, its laws, its facts, its relations, its nature, its ten- 
dency, and also those by which humanity is now able to 
express systematically and formally its knowledge of it- 
self. Chemistry, physics, biology, geology, geography, 
anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology, anthropo- 
logy, histology, botany, ecology, philology, and many 
other subordinate subjects belong to the sciences. 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 165 

The arts are those subjects by whose methods and 
devices humanity expresses its mastery of the world by 
setting its objects in the order or appearance of beauty 
or of harmonious utihty. They include music, painting, 
architecture, sculpture, carpentry, iron -working, and 
many another exercise of skill. They may be assigned 
in groups under the term, "fine and industrial arts," or 
perhaps with intermediate groups of art-crafts and of 
applied sciences. 

Not a few subjects are difficult to classify. Poetry is 
both a humanity and an art : medicine is both a science 
and an art, as is education also : or perhaps more exactly, 
medicine and education are or should be applied sciences : 
history is both a humanity and a science. Political sci- 
ence cannot be accurately classified ; for, like political 
economy and, to a degree, history, it is composed of all 
three elements. 

By employing these materials appropriately, the formal 
system of education proposes to accomplish the purposes 
of the school. As introductions to the humanities, it has 
invented two of "the three R's," reading and writing ; 
as introductions to the sciences and arts, it invented 
arithmetic long ago, and Nature-study recently; arid as 
introductions to the arts, it invented drawing and scale- 
singing. I call these affairs "inventions," though recogniz- 
ing fully that in subject-matter they are either primitive 
or puerile or both. It is in their methods that reading, 
writing, arithmetic, drawing, and singing are school in- 
ventions. 

At this point, we come upon a singular matter. Adults 
of normal power and children of superior, or supernor- 
mal, power may enter upon the humanities, upon the 
sciences, and upon the arts without the formal bridging of 
these school arts. Of what use, then, are these mediate 
methods } First, to anticipate the natural maturing of 
the powers, to hasten the process, and to insure it. By 



i66 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

education, years of experience may often be saved ; that 
is, education short-circuits experience. Second, to save 
those whom life by its haphazard and by its apparent 
chaos would otherwise ruin. This saving is accom- 
pHshed by setting in order the ideas, and by training, 
disciplining, and regulating the functions, of the mind. 
Third, to found in the mind the elements of knowledge 
before it must face complexities ; and thereby vastly to 
broaden its talents. For without the stimulus of the 
School arts, few would ever be versatile or open-minded 
or fortified upon more than a single side of their natures. 
Mere life tends to sharpness, narrowness, positiveness : it 
is intense. The School arts lead to roundness, breadth, 
balance, for the School is not focused upon mere success, 
which is survival among competitors. 

These school arts, reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, 
drawing, and recently sewing, bench work, and^ calisthenics, 
must not be confused with the true arts suggested by these 
terms. The general public of adults and the artists and 
craftsmen (as also not a few schoolmasters) are often, perhaps 
usually, wrong in their estimate of these exercises. The causes 
of their error are characteristic : The general public think 
that children and youth approach all subjects as adults do, 
perhaps more slowly and weakly, yet with essentially the same 
powers. The artists and craftsmen suppose that the subjects 
are pursued for their own sake, whereas in fact they are pur- 
sued solely for the sake of the students. The difference is 
wholly a matter of the point of view with a resultant antipodal 
opposition in method. Because of the difference in method, 
reading is. not Hterature, wriling is neither penmanship nor lit- 
erary composition, singing is not music either as science or 
as art, drawing is not etching, not painting, not architecture, 
not design, sewing is not tailoring, bench work is not car- 
pentry or cabinet-making, and calisthenics are not gymnas- 
tics ; but each is an admirable preparation for its respective 
art or craft, a setttng out toward a goal, a strengthening for 
reality. 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 167 

A school art (contrary to popular notions and to artistic 
prejudices) is not to be taken too seriously. The parent who 
said of her ten-year-old son, " Well, I should think Johnny 
would not try to write his composition neatly when he knows 
that his teacher will throw it into the waste basket without a 
second reading," did not understand child nature. John 
could not be persuaded to write at all, if he supposed that his 
little paper would be photographed and reproduced in fac- 
simile for publication in a monthly magazine and treasured 
up against him to the day of his death.^ 

A school art is mediate, its product is ephemeral, and its 
motive is solely educational, being the desire to grow rapidly 
and well.^ 

The formal system of education takes the school arts, the 
humanities, the sciences, and the true arts, and so disposes 
their subject-matter and their exercises of method as to pro- 
mote the growth of boys and girls into healthy, competent, 
and happy men and women, useful to one another ; or should 
do so. Moreover, beside the school arts, there are several 
other knowledges and skills so strangely transformed by edu- 
cational requirements as to be only in name what they seem 
to be. The general history and even the United States his- 
tory are arranged and edited for school use quite beyond 
identification with the true subject of history. Literature is 
emasculated without being feminized, its editing being apro- 
cess partly of elimination and of generalization and partly of 
reduction from adult truthfulness to educational serviceabil- 
ity. Geography, though confessedly made simple, is supposed 
to be made also encyclopedic, yet scarcely one cycle is dis- 
coverable in it. However, geography is more nearly what it 
purports to be than any other subject in the curriculum of the 
first seven or eight years. 

The problem of educational method is how to arrange 
the studies, lessons, exercises, games so as really to pro- 
mote the growth of the soul, to advance its welfare, to 

^ All thai John asks is that his teacher and perhaps his mother learn 
from his product what he is. 

^ Kehr, Geschickte der Methodik. 



i68 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

relate it happily and profitably to what is best in the 
world. This is the problem of pedagogy, its function, 
its responsibility ; and I confess grave doubts as to its 
general success. 

Naturally, education in all its lines of endeavor, in 
pedagogy as in everything else, has followed the Hne of 
least resistance. In this case, the line has been traced 
through the traditional course in subject-matter, partly 
because it is traditional, partly because it is subjective 
and speculative, partly because it seemed to recapitulate 
the racial experience, and partly because human life seems 
too sacred for experiment. The tradition is easy to fol- 
low, easy for the conscience as well as for the intellect. 
What was good for the father may be, perhaps must be, 
good for the son. All caste is based upon this notion, 
and caste has controlled ages and millions of the civilized. 
The old course has been solidly established in the mind 
of the teacher. He is sure of its facts and of its princi- 
ples, of its methods and of its results. Every presump- 
tion is in its favor. It made him what he is. Now the 
teacher is characteristically not self-alienated, for he has 
had no "practical experience in life." Such experience 
means learning by undirected experiment upon untried 
affairs. It is "practical experience" for a theological 
student to get out among the people as a book agent or 
street traction employee ; or for a lawyer to serve as clerk 
in a store ; or for a college professor to try farming. In 
the popular sense of the term, the practical man has no 
instruction from others and no consciously and intelli- 
gently worked out theory of his own to guide him. In 
this sense, the practical man is ''self-made." The value 
of practical experience is in securing thereby self-aliena- 
tion through familiarizing one's self with self-absorbing 
enterprises of which hitherto one knew nothing. Since 
God has made the human mind a generally efficient 
agent, frequently by practical experience one becomes 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 169 

very skillful in a strange art, of whose methods one 
knows nothing scientifically/ Such experience, when 
successful, breeds confidence in one's own powers, de- 
velops sympathy with others, and by projecting self out 
of one's self into the world shows one's self to the self. 
The instruction of others can never accomplish so much 
for one. I do not mean that the untaught artist will 
surpass in skill one who is well taught : far otherwise. I 
mean that one who knows nothing beside what he has 
been taught and what he has experienced in connection 
with his learning will never know himself. 

The typical teacher has this education : an elementary 
school course, three or four years of high school, one, two, or 
three years of normal school or four years of college. Then 
he or she immediately begins teaching. All that he knows 
consists of home, of school, and of friends, and nothing of a 
world not of home, not of school, not of friends. But such an 
experience discovers only a part, a very small part, of the real 
world. It is group life, — not communal, not social life. 

Of necessity, so trained, the professional teacher is narrow. 
Here rests the sole philosophical justification of the board of 
education's consisting of laymen and looking with worldly 
eyes upon teachers and their institution, the School. Having 
no particular will or emotion in repeating in his own school 
the lessons taught him in the schools of his childhood, the 
teacher tends to rely upon his intellect alone and unfortu- 
nately upon but two intellectual functions, attention and 
memory, and mainly the latter. The educational result is too 
familiar to need emphasis here. The School, which ought 
to drive against inefficiency and immorality, ignores these 
perils and confines its weak efforts to illiteracy, broadly con- 
ceived. The applauded graduate of the school, the " scholar," 
is a bookman and very little more, seldom even a book 
writer. 

Obviously, w^e must correct this in the interests of humanity, 
of progress, of sound culture, of social righteousness. The 

^ Hadley, The Educatio7t of the American Citizen, Twelfth Paper. 



170 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

formal system of education must deal with far more than it 
yet sees.^ To begin at the true beginning, education must 
secure whole-hearted and strong-willed as well as learned 
teachers. 

As a matter of self-alienation, no experience in life enforces 
such self-understanding as marriage and parentage. And yet 
by our salaries, and in the case of our women often by our 
rules, we forbid marriage and parentage. As certainly as that 
nothing that is false to human nature can last, this prescrip- 
tion of celibacy for women teachers cannot last.^ 

It is a commonplace among school superintendents that 
the youthful normal school graduates are too young to teach 
boys and girls over twelve years of age ; despite the fact that 
they are nearer them in age, these girls have very little sym- 
pathy with, or understanding of, these adolescents. They do 
better, we all say, with young children. The reason is per- 
fectly clear. The maiden of twenty is still in adolescence, but 
out of childhood. Adolescence is a true self-alienation from 
childhood, and gives a point of view and a perspective for 
childhood. The young maidens, the virgins of thirty years, 
and the " old maids " who understand boys and girls above 
thirteen years of age are very, very few. Those who do not 
understand them are, of course, out of place in grammar and 
high schools. I say "of course," knowing that my statement 
is a challenge of existing conditions. I am ready to agree 
that the unmarried young man is quite as much out of place 
in grammar or high school as the unwedded woman. My pro- 
position is very broad. As the legal profession, the clerical, 
and the medical is composed mostly of men who are husbands 
and fathers, I believe that the educational profession should be 
co7nposed mostly of parents. 

But, it may be objected, we have no ban upon married men 
in the profession. Many and many a time, I have known 
boards of education to refuse to appoint a man with a wife 
and family to a position paying but eight hundred or a thou- 

^ Tyler, Growth and Education. 

* The City of New York, the District of Columbia, and several other 
municipalities now employ married women freely. 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 171 

sand dollars, despite the fact that the candidate was ready 
to take the salary. The reason submitted by the board is 
always this : "They cannot live decently upon the money." 
Perhaps not. Perhaps it is also true that married men willing 
to take the sum are inferior in ability and in energy to un- 
married men of that money-value. I have an opinion that for 
a young man to dare risk the support of a wife, in this age, 
bears testimony either to uncommon energy or to uncommon 
folly; and am willing to trust to professional examination 
the elimination of the fools. 



To the establishment of a formal system of education, 
such as the nation needs, the first essential is securing 
the right kind of educators, both men and women. Hus- 
band and grown children must be no more a bar than 
wife and children. On the contrary, they should consti- 
tute a favorable element in a candidacy for appointment. 



To this proposition there will be several objections. To 
consider them with the utmost brevity. — The first objection 
is that for a wife and mother to support herself and to help 
in the support of her children is to break up the family. His- 
torically and logically, this is arrant nonsense. Through un- 
told ages until the invention of machinery and business-based- 
on-money-exchange, mothers supported their children. Do 
not imagine that the prolongation of infancy that made man 
human was a feat performed by the father alone or by the 
father mainly. It was the victory of the mother over a lower 
animalism that she first outgrew, teaching the father by her 
example. Until machinery multiplied goods and exchange 
transferred them with extreme ease, mothers were as essen- 
tial to the home as were fathers : they cooked, wove, sewed, 
planted, as well as bore the babes and suckled them. Millions 
of mothers to-day work as hard as do the fathers to feed and 
clothe the children. Several millions are factory operatives 
and store clerks, bringing home their wages for the family 
use; and trying to keep house by evening, Sunday, and 
before-day-dawn labor. There is nothing unwomanly, nothing 



172 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

unmotherly, nothing unhistorical in the support of children 
by mothers.^ 

Another objection is that women teachers who are also 
mothers will neglect their school work because of home duties 
in out-of-school hours. Unless made specific, such an objec- 
tion does not sit well upon the lips either of men, who are 
characteristically less conscientious than women in matters of 
detail, or of unmarried women, many of whom are very pro- 
perly spending their evenings and holidays in companionship 
with possible husbands. The woman teacher who, well past 
thirty, has entirely given up the desire or the fond fear of 
marriage may perhaps safely criticise her married sister who 
wishes to become or to continue a teacher ; that is, she may, 
unless, as is very often the case, she is the housekeeper for 
invalid parents or other relatives in dependence upon her. 
One specific averment does lie against the young married 
woman ; but when we all come, as we should, to the view that 
a leave of absence for a few years should be enforced upon 
teachers every sabbatical period and freely granted upon 
request at any time, we shall be glad to see the happily mar- 
ried woman and mother in our schools. The notion that a 
teacher must teach two hundred days every year or cease to 
be a teacher is a survival of the time when teachers were 
bondmen. 

Another objection supposed to lie against the employment 
of married women whose husbands are living is that their 
employment displaces unmarried women. This objection is 
not valid against the proposition to employ only the married 
women with talent, training, and successful experience before 
marriage. We are certainly not supplied in America with a 
sufficient number of good teachers. With married men shut 
out from the elementary school-rooms as class teachers be- 
cause of poor salaries, and with married women, however 
skillful, shut out by regulations or by fixed custom, we are 
forced to accept as teachers many young girls with neither 
talent nor training for educational duties. There are 300,000 
maiden school teachers in America ; but only 2,000,000 maids 

1 Oilman, Human Work ; also various poems. 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 173 

above twenty-one years of age in all. Not one woman in 
seven is really born with the talents and the disposition for 
teaching. In our country now, every year one maid in five of 
our school teachers gives up teaching for marriage ; and some 
inexperienced girl five years younger than herself takes her 
place, or tries to take it. Against a double injustice, — to the 
school children and to the teacher, — I raise this protest. 

All other objections to married women appear frivolous ; 
that they will obey their husbands rather than their princi- 
pals ; that they should be housekeepers rather than teachers ; 
and that their husbands will live in idleness upon their earn- 
ings. The answers to these objections are too obvious for 
explanation ; intelligent American women are no longer 
"obedient " to any one, but faithful in a larger sense than en- 
slaved wives could ever be ; housekeeping is not synonymous 
with motherhood or homemaking ; and the kind of woman 
who was so successful in teaching before marriage that her 
services are desired after marriage seldom chooses a loafer 
as a husband. 

To found, then, a formal system of education, competent for 
its purposes in a democracy, we require that the majority of 
our teachers of boys and girls above twelve shall be husbands 
or wives, fathers or mothers, and that some of our teachers 
of smaller children shall be parents. In the college, univer- 
sity, and professional school, the professors are men of family. 
Especially in the high school do we need to follow their ex- 
ample. Fathers and mothers of grown boys and girls are 
none too experienced, none too wise to manage the boys and 
girls of other parents. A high school of a thousand students 
needs a faculty of forty or fifty teachers, ten or a dozen 
fathers, as many mothers, and a minority only of subordinate 
bachelors and maidens, corresponding to the youthful tutors 
of the colleges and ushers of the English schools. 

A young woman "studying to be a teacher" should be 
studying as much for her life work as she who is studying 
law or medicine or theology, or any young man who is study- 
ing for any profession. This is the sane view. Without it, 
there can never be a profession of education. Without it, we 
can never make a profession of what, to a majority of the 



174 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

practitioners, is now merely a makeshift until marriage or other 
"good fortune" relieves them of the unhappy " necessity " 
to teach. 

The employment, to this time constantly increasing both 
absolutely and relatively, of young women and of unmarried 
women as teachers was originally due to three causes, two 
meritorious and the third temporarily necessary but now dis- 
creditable. Of these, the first was the fact that with rising 
standards of professional preparation for teachers, the young 
women just out of school were actually to be preferred to 
older men and women not equally well prepared. Many ex- 
perienced teachers, male and female, without training, were 
displaced or replaced by younger but better equipped women. 
The second was the fact, already presented, that woman is 
often peculiarly fitted by age and disposition to teach sympa- 
thetically the children from four to ten years of age.^ It is 
still true and is likely always to be true that buoyant, care- 
free girls and 5^oung women from nineteen to twenty-five or 
twenty-eight years of age make particularly good kindergart- 
ners. The third reason was the institution in cities of com- 
pulsory education : this forced many children into school, 
especially children from eleven to fourteen years of age. 
Consequently, boards of education found it necessary to em- 
ploy many more teachers than before. The most available 
persons to be secured by the insufficient funds of these gov- 
erning boards were the young women of the country such 
as before 1875 had very few economic opportunities. Their 
labor was cheap and has remained cheap, despite the won- 
derful improvement in its quality. Because of the number of 
such teachers, their employment became a "cult" carefully 
fostered by thrifty tax-payers. A century ago only, of the 
women, "dames" and "goodbodies," that is, mothers and 
housewives, were ever employed as teachers. The young 
girls were found not only cheap but very amenable to lay 
control by school trustees and visitors. The " cult " throve 
until it has become almost a superstition. But in this age, 

^ Chamberlain, The Child in Folk-thought^ p. 236 ; Thompson, Day 
Dreams of a Schoolmaster^ p. 120. 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 175 

when the School is being restored to the control of educators 
as professional superintendents, principals, and supervisors, 
the rights of the child to education by the best teachers are 
also being restored, and the mothers and the fathers are 
coming back into the schools as teachers. The cult, scarcely 
three decades in duration, will soon be recognized as a fad 
and will pass into history as a curious example of the force 
of temporary economic and cultural conditions. 

A competent profession of educators, exercising the 
authority already sufficiently indicated, supplied with 
buildings, apparatus, and salaries worthy of the cause, 
would conduct education upon lines and by methods, 
devices, and materials quite beyond the imagination of 
the practical worker in these transition days when uni- 
versal education is impoverished, weak, and empirical. 
What formal system it would establish no man can fore- 
see. And yet few will doubt that certain features would 
appear. These I submit one by one, expecting a chal- 
lenge of each, and knowing that I cannot be right 
in all. 

First : The period of education, while compulsory, will 
be arbitrary not as to age but as to attainment. Every 
boy and every girl will be kept at school until adoles- 
cence has passed its climax and character and intelli- 
gence have been well established. The ideal is to send 
out each graduate literate, efficient, and moral, able to 
understand at least the important phases of neighboring 
society, ready to do something worth while, and strong 
not only to resist temptation, but also to help others in 
righteousness. Every depraved and vicious boy and girl, 
man and woman, — by whatever name they may be 
called, by whatever immorality he or she may take a 
living out of the world, and whether their gambling or 
drunkenness or tramping or promiscuity or other crimi- 
nality be a survival of primitive and natural conditions, 
which the good have overcome, or whether these ecstasies 



176 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

or sorrows be perversions due to a multitudinous human- 
ity, careless of its degenerates, — is evidence that edu- 
cation is incomplete, and that the School does not yet 
perform its perfect v^ork. 

Second : The materials of education will be widely 
varied to meet different individuals and to remedy dif- 
ferent social conditions. All the elementary work will, 
however, be done in one "common school" for all as 
now, the ideal einheitsscJmle of the German Democrats, 
our real school dedicated to equality of opportunity. 
Options and electives must be multiplied, and "con- 
stants," though maintained in definite form, must be 
reduced in number.^ The "bents," when bad, must be 
made straight ; when good, must be followed. Aptitudes 
and interests must be atrophied when dangerous and 
nourished when profitable. We must aim at breadth 
of mind, at sincerity of heart, and at strength of will. 
Ideals, which issue from knowledge functioning as aims 
and guides, must be implanted in curiosity by teaching 
facts upon principle, and motives, which issue from 
knowledge functioning as impulses and desires, must 
be developed in feeling by action likewise upon prin- 
ciple. 

Third : Study, recitation, lecture, and exercises must 
be proportioned not only to the various grades of the 
School, but also to the various individuals. The desider- 
atum is to do away with idleness and to secure in every 
moment work or whole-hearted play or perfect rest. 
Since we are to keep the boy and the girl at school 
until educated, and since we are to give them the mate- 
rials needed by their souls, we must see that every 
moment counts for growth. 

Fourth: The School "as good as the people want " is 
as useless as the Church that is no better than its 
attendants and neighbors. The School must be rescued 

^ Harris, Educational Values, Report, 1893-94, p. 617. 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATIOxN 177 

from mediocrity and supineness and sordidness. It must 
be made so good as to be a happy memory and a con- 
stant inspiration when school days are over. Knowing 
the schools of the people as they are, I marvel that the 
people are as intelligent and as good as they are. 
The kindness overflowing from strength that is anxious 
to be of service, the love of truth that characterizes men 
and women of free nobility, the sense of beauty potent 
in the souls that mean to bring ideals to reality and to 
harmonize art and fact, and the wealth that God and in- 
vention have now made possible everywhere in this land, 
must transform the actual School of the present into the 
enlarged, enkindled, enriched, and ennobled School of 
the future, to the end that as many as possible (not 
merely the survivors of a narrow formalism) shall be 
saved for themselves and for this nation. The vicious 
do not desire such a School, nor do the avaricious, the 
tyrannical, or the slothful; idv vice feeds on ignorance 
and begets it, and avarice thinks to grow rich upon the 
forced labor of the starveling, tyranny fears the intelli- 
gent, and sloth is scornful of the diligent. The School 
must not reflect civilization as it is, but must image the 
civilization that may come to pass. The formalism of 
these times, which hides its shallowness and insufficiency 
behind programmes, courses, reports, regulations, and rou- 
tine drudgery, must give way to life, to the informal that 
is spiritual. And the life will justify itself, as it has in 
all ages of the past, by creating new and larger forms 
and modes for the larger spirit that is ever flowing into 
the soul of man. The new School will be a relation 
between teacher and learner: all the rest will be inci- 
dental. As Confucius said, "Better a conversation with 
a wise man than five years of the study of books." The 
School must be for every pupil a walk and conversation 
with wise men, such as use forms and modes not as ends 
but as means. The real product of the good School is 



178 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

not high marks, fine compositions, beautiful drawings, the 
Latin essay, a steam-engine, but youth who love the light 
and are strong for service. 

Fifth : Studies and exercises of every description will 
be evaluated with reference to the pupils and graded 
according to their needs. The boy will not study all 
American history consecutively when fifteen years of 
age because "he will soon leave school," nor will the 
girl study " Evangeline " because " every American 
should know something of Longfellow." The location 
of studies and exercises will be determined solely in the 
interest of the pupil, for the purpose of the School is to 
furnish forth into life the best possible man or woman. 
By assuming this sovereignty, the School renounces all 
obligations of service to Church, to State, to Business, to 
Art, and to Culture. It teaches nothing upon dictation ; 
and the sole utilitarianism that it knows is the utilita- 
rianism of providing for Society capable, righteous, and 
learned men and women. On the other hand, and indeed 
as a consequence of this position, the School will utilize, 
as never before, all knowledge and art in the preparation 
of men and women ; and it will serve, therefore, as never 
before, Society and all its institutions. Of course, when 
the School aims to send out completely educated young 
men and women, the man who is only a business man 
will deplore the rising wages and the insufficiency of 
cheap help, he who is only a politician will resent the 
activity of independents, he who is only a clergyman 
will mourn the prevalence of free thinkers, and he who 
"wants a submissive wife" or some other woman victim 
of "man's superiority" will want her forever, since none 
will be ready for the sacrifice. For when the School is 
strong and bold enough to evaluate and locate studies 
and exercises as the School chooses, we shall find many 
omissions and additions and changes in its management, 
curricula, and results ; and its courses will display a 



THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 179 

simplicity as gratifying to intelligent critics as it will be 
delightful to the pupils. 

Sixth : The School will increase not only in number 
of subjects and exercises but in complexity of organiza- 
tion and in the variety of particular schools. We need 
schools for children under seven, schools for children 
from eight to twelve, schools for boys and girls from 
thirteen to sixteen, and schools for youth from seven- 
teen to twenty. Each school requires a special kind of 
faculty and a peculiar kind of management, because 
each offers a characteristic problem. Whether two con- 
secutive schools are under one roof is not very import- 
ant, but they must have different teachers and different 
organization and administration. 

This School of the future is forever coming to pass. 
Evidences of increasing independence, of growing know- 
ledge, of new, higher, and larger ideals, while not on 
every hand, outweigh and outnumber all evidences to 
the contrary. 



CHAPTER X 

LEGISLATION, ADMINISTRATION, SUPERVISION, AND 
INSTRUCTION AS EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 

For the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive. — Paul, 2 Corifithians iii, 6. 

In all things, Government and cooperation are the Laws of Life ; Anarchy and compe- 
tition, the Laws of Death . . . Laws are the definitions and bonds of custom, or of what 
the Nation desires should become custom. Archie law directs what is or is not to be done ; 
meristic law prescribes what is or is not to be possessed; and critic law defines what is or 
is not to be suffered. . . . All forms of government are good just so far as they attain 
this one vital necessity of policy — t/iai the wise and ki7id,/e'w or fnany, shall govern 
the tmwise and iinkind — Ruskin, Muftera Pulveris^ chapters v-vi. 

What limit can be placed to this power of producing variations of organ and of func- 
tion, reciprocally determined and interdependent, which acts through long ages and rigidly 
scrutinizes the whole constitution, structure, and habits of each creature, favoring the 
good and rejecting the bad? I can see no limit to this power, in slowly and beautifully 
adapting each form to the most complex relations of life. — Darwin, Origin of Species, 
final chapter. 

In the evolution of human society, there has been dis- 
covered a wonderful machine by which progress may be 
intentionally produced by majority agreement, so that 
we need no longer to depend upon accidental collisions 
of persons and of groups, but in peaceful and orderly 
fashion may resolve upon and adopt our line of march. 
This wonderful machine has been the theme of many 
writers ^ and the resource of all modern progressives. It 
is the legislature of the delegates of the people operat- 
ing the republic as a representative democracy. 

Neither state nor government, neither legislature nor 
democracy, is the simple affair that it appears to be. Each 
indeed is so complicated as almost to defy analysis, history, 
and description. There is as yet no complete science of hu- 
man nature, though this science has its beginnings in psy- 

^ " The legislator is essentially an inventor and a scientific discoverer." 
Ward, Psychic Factors in Civilization, p. 309. 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS i8i 

chology. And there can be no complete science of democracy 
until there is a clear science of society : that is, we cannot 
know the people until we know both the political man and the 
private man, the latter of whom the Greeks called " idiot." 
Man in democracy is in the position of the prospector who 
has found gold but who must yet dig the mine to get the 
ore out. 

The first, fundamental, distinctive, and characteristic 
legislature of a great democratic people, conscious of its 
power and hopeful of its destiny, is the convention to form 
the constitution, which is to be its basic law. This legisla- 
ture meets occasionally.^ Its every convention is a crisis 
in the history of the people. Once inaugurated, only the 
power of a military genius can prevent or overthrow it. 
At some point, every government depends upon auto- 
cratic will, — personal, oligarchic, aristocratic, demo- 
cratic. The constitutional convention, whether or not it 
submits its decisions to the approval of other political 
bodies, expresses the will of democracy. The constitu- 
tional convention of our Nation was more genuinely demo- 
cratic than that of any State save four, for its conclusion 
permits men and women alike to vote. In forty-one 
States, we are still governed by a political aristocracy of 
adult males. 

The American constitutions. National and State, create 
the conditions of all the social institutions, — Religion, 
Government, Family, Property, Education, Culture, War, 
Business. 

In the State of New Jersey, by virtue of the Constitution 
and of Acts of the Legislature, designed to make its provisions 
effective, the differentiation of the School from the State has 

1 If the American Constitution of 1787 had provided for a convention 
every forty or fifty years, probably there never would have been a War of 
Secession. Such a recurrent constitutional convention might be composed 
of two houses, one to consist of all living ex-Governors of States and the 
other of all living ex-Senators, ex-Presidents, and the Supreme Court 
Justices. 



i82 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

proceeded so far as to suggest the independent integration 
of the former. The State School Superintendent is a court of 
special and superior jurisdiction in all legal matters of public 
education, and appeals go from him to the State Board of 
Education. The State courts cannot interfere with any exec- 
utive orders or legal interpretations issuing from City, County, 
and State Superintendents, or from the various municipal 
boards of education or the State Board, save that the Supreme 
Court may determine the constitutionality of a particular 
law. As a matter of custom, the State Legislature passes, 
with little or no change, the bills proposed by the State 
Board of Education. Every municipality is a school district, 
constituting a corporation separate from the ordinary city 
corporation. Municipal school officers are in no sense town 
or city officers, and are, therefore, independent of mayors, 
councils, and all other boards.^ The State pays more than 
half of all local school expenditures, save those for buildings. 
The differentiation is not complete, because the laws for 
the School are made by the State Legislature, not by the 
State Board of Education, though indeed many minor rules 
and regulations are made by the latter body. All taxes are 
provided for, though not entirely determined in amount, by 
the State Legislature. A considerable degree of autonomy 
is vested in local boards of education as to rules and regula- 
tions. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction, how- 
ever, is nominated by the Governor, and confirmed by the 
Senate of the State Legislature. Since he must hold a State 
certificate to teach, he belongs educationally to the School, 
though politically to the State. 

The legislation for the School begins v^ith the Consti- 
tutional Convention, proceeds through the Legislature, 
the State Board of Education, if any, and the County 
Board of Education, if any, and ends with the Munici- 
pal Board of Education. This legislation is of exceed- 
ing importance, especially that by the first three bodies. 
Here many vital questions are settled, if not ansv^ered. 

^ Chancellor, Oztr Schools, note, p. 41. 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 183 

It is legislation usually by men not only incompetent, but 
also indifferent. Many State and municipal legislators 
are disloyal to the public welfare, and a few are malicious. 

1. Legislation that makes education compulsory from six 
to twelve years of age betrays education, because these are 
not the most important years for education. 

2. Legislation that makes education compulsory only in 
name, but provides all manner of ways of escape and fails 
to provide economic support for the children of dire poverty, 
is false to democracy. 

3. Legislation that provides fine and broad curricula with 
or without ample and appropriate buildings and apparatus, 
but fails to provide a sufficient number of happily circum- 
stanced and efficient teachers, is incompetent. 

4. Legislation that lays heavy burdens upon teachers, but 
provides for them only ignorant, disloyal, and dishonest con- 
trollers, as municipal board members, is malicious. 

5. Legislation that by authorizing rigid contracts without 
release clauses, by forbidding married teachers to teach, and 
by similar restrictions of personal liberty, degrades what 
should be a profession into State helotage, is subversive of 
civilization. 

6. Legislation that creates such an office as that of super- 
intendent without prescribing the highest professional quali- 
fications and assigning rights, privileges, and responsibilities, 
is such a mockery of education as grieves and alarms the 
intelligent patriot. 

7. Legislation that promotes or even permits unsanitary, 
unhygienic school buildings, grounds, courses, exercises, pro- 
grammes, or rules and regulations, and fails to make health 
the beginning and the end of education, is the modern offer- 
ing up of the seed of mankind to Moloch. 

All the possibilities of the improvement of education 
begin with legislation, for the constitutional convention 
of democracy is omnipotent. Private education, paro- 
chial education, and endowed education, as well as free 
common education, may well be improved by legislation. 



i84 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

As a stream cannot rise higher than its source, so educa- 
tion cannot rise higher than the legislation that initiates 
it. Law is the die by which all schooling must be cut. 
The trunk of a tree tapers from its roots up. 

Briefly, so much as to legislation as an educational 
instrument. Second in importance is administration. 
The laws may be very good, but when badly executed 
or not executed at all, the educational conditions must be 
very bad. Under the same State laws, even under simi- 
lar municipal regulations, one city may have excellent 
schools and another criminally poor schools. I mean 
criminally in the literal sense, that is, schools so poor as 
to defy the laws and to render their administrators liable 
to indictment and to conviction. With really bad laws, 
it is not possible to have good schools. 

In order to have a good administration of good laws, 
it is necessary to have a good system and competent, 
efficient, and righteous administrative officers. The State 
laws limit but slightly the administration of private, en- 
dowed, and parochial schools. The noteworthy peculi- 
arity of American State legislation is that it leaves the 
private school free to do almost anything that its admin- 
istrators choose. While creating the vast public school 
system, it permits, one may even say encourages, the 
supplementing of this system by the establishment and 
conduct of other schools. In many States, so numerous 
and so correlated are the Catholic parochial schools that 
they constitute a system rivaling that of the State 
schools. The prevalence of private, endowed, and Epis- 
copal, Catholic, Lutheran, and other parochial schools 
has alarmed some publicists, sociologists, and others to 
such an extent that they have proposed various inter- 
ferences with their freedom in isolation from State 
control. 

Among these interferences, accomplished in some 
States or at least proposed, are these : — 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 185 

1. To require the employment only of properly qualified 
teachers, whose proficiency shall be known, perhaps even 
determined, by State educational inspectors.^ 

2. To enforce the compulsory attendance of boys and girls 
of so-called "school age" by the visitation of attendance 
C truant ") officers in private as well as in public schools. 

3. To require instruction in certain subjects, such as read- 
ing, writing, arithmetic, hygiene, American history, by the 
inspection of State educational officers. 

4. To enforce laws relating to ventilation, sanitation, hy- 
giene, lighting, seating capacity, per capita of pupils to the 
teacher, gradation, graduation, and similar matters. 

5. To permit the transfer of pupils to and from public 
schools only upon rules and by examinations of the State 
teachers. 

6. To apportion State public funds to such private, en- 
dowed, or parochial schools as fully conform to State laws 
and regulations, and to close up others. 

The State seriously questions the right of parents 
to place their children in schools of inferior quality, or 
of teachers to control and instruct them there. By the 
democratic State, we all live and die. By the- quality of 
its people, it lives or dies, — whence proceeds the right 
of the democratic State to do what it will with its own. 
This is not mere theory. As matter of fact, the despotic, 
omnipotent, modern democratic State actually before 
our own eyes is doing what it will with our children, whom, 
be it known, plainly and to our sorrow, it often chooses 
to treat cheaply and meanly.^ 

In most States, the public schools constitute a sys- 
tem centralized in form, if not in fact, about a State 
Superintendent of Public Instruction and a State Board 
of Education. This officer and this board have more or 

1 Cf. Constitution of Texas and Statutes of Massachusetts. 

2 The plans and methods of good administration m private schools are 
too various and too complex to be discussed in these pages. Our main 
concern is with the public schools. 



i86 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

less executive control and legislative jurisdiction over 
the district schools. The State control of the schools in 
districts of the cities and towns is usually much less than 
that of the schools in the districts of the villages and 
strictly rural neighborhoods. In some States, the cities 
and towns possess charters, giving them distinctive rights 
and privileges, and isolating them from the general State 
system. Such charters in this age are survivals of elder 
ages when universities, guilds, and other societies, cor- 
porations, and institutions secured liberties by grants 
from imperial sovereigns or from feudal lords. 

In general, through the State School system. State 
and School are paralleled and demarked by a political 
board of education and an educational hierarchical officer 
known as State, County, City, or Town superintendent 
or Village or Township principal. This paralleling of 
State and School indicates the differentiation of the 
School from the State and its integration as an equal 
social institution. Of course, it may be argued, as indeed 
it often has been, that the State adopted the ancient 
School and is transforming it in character. Or it may 
be argued that the schools, many and various, seeking 
homogeneousness and integrity, seized upon the State 
for support and have become a great social institution, 
essentially and unfortunately, perhaps irredeemably, para- 
sitic. But the truth appears to be that the democratic 
State, seeking evolution into competent and just govern- 
ment, calculated to advance the welfare of mankind, dis- 
covered in the ancient schools an invaluable idea, that of 
the probability of education from the right formal disci- 
pline and instruction. Democracy then saw what was 
never before known in the world save by men of genius, 
— that education is the mode, the only mode, of continu- 
ous progress. Democracy saw in education part of the 
cause and all of the cure of civilization ; saw, that is to 
say, that government of the people, by the people, for 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 187 

the people can and will produce a happy civilization by 
means of true education and by no other means whatso- 
ever. In this view, then, the School is as much the pro- 
duct of the democratic spirit as the State itself is. The 
history of education shows that since democracy took 
possession of the School, it has been born again, born 
into a larger life. 

The business of the local board of education is four- 
fold.^ It must raise in whole or in part the funds for 
buildings and maintenance by appeal either to town 
meeting or to city council or by direct levy upon pro- 
perty ; sometimes it has very great, sometimes very 
limited, powers in respect to securing funds. It must ex- 
pend such funds as it gets for permanent improvements 
or for current expenses. It must secure teachers, jani- 
tors, and other employees to operate its plant. And it 
must govern the schools. At a thousand points in this 
business, the local board may fall below the ideal of edu- 
cation as expressed in the State laws. 

This local board is legislative, administrative, and judi- 
cial. It legislates when it prescribes rules and regulations 
to carry out State laws. It administers when it purchases 
sites and erects buildings. Through the teachers em- 
ployed, the board administers theoretically at least, often 
really, even the education itself. It is judicial in that it 
decides all appeals from the actions of its appointees and 
employees. 

The local superintendent is also an administrative, a 
legislative, and a judicial officer. Unless he has rights 
derived from qualifications prescribed by the laws of the 
State Legislature or from the rules and regulations of 
the State or County Board of Education, he is almost 
wholly subordinate to the municipal board of education. 

1 Where the board is merely tenant in buildings held by other 
boards, there the board of education is an intermediary for the School 
to the State. 



i88 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

He has, of course, the contractual and personal rights 
guaranteed by National and State Constitutions and a 
certain measure of rights due to public opinion, which 
fortunately, because it holds him rather than the board 
of education responsible for actual school conditions, is 
very apt to support him in controversies with that 
board. 

In a city school system, there are usually from six to ten 
grades or ranks of the teaching force : first, the superintend- 
ent ; second, the associate, assistant, or deputy superintend- 
ents ; third, the general supervisors of special subjects, courses, 
or grades ; fourth, the division or district superintendents ; 
fifth, the principals of schools with or without annexes or 
branches, the high school principals outranking but not con- 
trolling the grammar (full elementary) school principals, and 
these outranking and sometimes controlling the intermediate 
and primary school principals ; sixth, the vice or assistant 
principals, if any ; seventh, the heads of departments within 
the schools, if any; eighth, first assistants; ninth, directors 
with one or more subordinates ; and tenth, the class teachers, 
permanent, temporary, and substitute. 

Such a system is essentially either hierarchical or feudal. 
Many varieties and forms are in actual existence or have 
been proposed. Sometimes the teachers have almost abso- 
lutely permanent tenure: their class-rooms are allodial posses- 
sions. Sometimes the system is a torso, with a superintendent 
in name but not in fact. Sometimes the reverse is true, when 
the board delegates to him all its powers, and he employs, 
discharges, transfers, elevates, and reduces all subordinates 
almost at his will. 

State and County systems vary in organization and 
in administration so radically as not to permit a brief 
summary of fact. The principles in issue may, however, 
be discussed and evaluated. Over against State central- 
ization stands local autonomy. Whatever may be our 
opinion as to which should prevail, we must agree that 
from Massachusetts to California the tendency in every 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 189 

State, with no demonstrable exception, is toward greater 
control by the State and away from that by the munici- 
pality. Very complicated municipal systems of education 
sometimes result. On the side of the State, there may 
be State legislature and courts, county board of free- 
holders and courts, and municipal council, mayor, judges, 
and others in partial control ; and on the side of the 
School, State board of education. State superintendent 
and staff, county board of education and superintendent, 
and municipal board of education and superintendent. 

State centralization seems to develop such advantages as 
these : — 

1. Assurance of local schools everywhere, reaching at least 
a minimum efficiency and maintained for at least a minimum 
term, 

2. Assurance of at least a minimum education for every 
child. 

3. Effective encouragement of progress and condemnation 
of retrogression in the weaker and more ignorant commu- 
nities. 

4. Such a measure of general uniformity as in our mobile 
population permits the pupil to go freely from a school in 
one community of the State to another, and facilitates " his 
transfer outside of the State to a school elsewhere. 

5. Establishment of a central office of education on guard 
at the State Capitol where sits the legislature with its vast 
powers over education, public and private. 

Local autonomy seems to develop certain other advan- 
tages : — 

1. Encouragement of the immediate personal interest and 
concern of parents and of other citizens in the education of 
the individual pupil. 

2. Incitement of effort in those educational activities which 
are represented by parents' organizations, free evening and 
holiday lectures, artistic buildings and grounds, kindergar- 
tens, and physical training of one kind and another. 

3. Appeals to various degrees of local pride : (a) excelling 



190 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

every other community ; {b) equaling the best communities 
elsewhere; {c) reaching at least the average.* 

From the extreme local freedom of Pennsylvania to 
the extreme centralization of Louisiana is a long dis- 
tance ; but recent developments in States as far apart as 
Nev^r York and California seem to indicate a national 
conviction that the safety of democracy rests wholly 
upon education, and that this is too important to be 
intrusted to municipalities. Indeed, the conviction is 
spreading that the Nation itself should organize a cen- 
tral office of education and build up a School system as 
wide as its own boundaries,^ Otherwise, the contrasts 
between the States in respect to intelligence, efficiency, 
and morality may become so great as to be a cause 
of sectional separations and antipathies. In particular, 
the establishment of great national universities, in the 
several regions of the country, with picked students on 
salaries and pledged to enter the government service as 
consuls, teachers,^ clerks, scientists, after graduation, is 
advocated as a practical necessity. Similarly, to prevent 
the child-illiteracy and the child-slaughter due to child- 
labor carelessly or callously permitted in certain States, 
to insure the industrial training of all citizens, whatever 
their nationality, race, religion, or color, to encourage 
proficiency in the sciences and the arts, — metallurgy, 
forestry, engineering, agriculture, and all other useful oc- 
cupations requiring skill, — and to diffuse generally a 
knowledge of the principles of morality in the common 
and the uncommon affairs and relations of life, national 
regulation and subsidizing of State school systems are 

* Button, Social Phases of Education. 

^ Ashby, Address, Department of Superintendence, Proceedings Ahi- 
tional Educational Association, Chicago, February, 1907. 

3 To secure national appropriations for normal schools is the purpose 
of an important educational association, with members in all parts of the 
land. 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 191 

urgently advocated. Of course, such a national system 
should be operated not by Congress, the national legisla- 
ture controlling the national " State," but by a national 
board of education to be provided by the national con- 
stitution and to control the national "School." Unde- 
sirable, even disagreeable as such a development may 
seem to many, it appears to lie in the natural and, there- 
fore, the inevitable course of events in a democracy, which 
is government according to human nature.^ 

Less important than school legislation, school administra- 
tion nevertheless may ruin the best plans for education. 

1. Administration that nullifies good legislation by employ- 
ing too few agents or incompetent ones is treachery to child- 
hood. 

2. Administration that improperly evaluates the three abso- 
lute essentials of education, — teachers, apparatus, and build- 
ings, — in the degree of its errors, retards or reverses 'the 
movement of society. 

There are two aspects of this matter greatly misunderstood. 
In terms of the present economic regime, buildings and 
teachers are not commensurable. A complete thirty-room ele- 
mentary schoolhouse costs, let us say, $250,000 to build and 
to equip properly and adequately, and requires forty-five 
teachers for its thousand pupils. The teachers should receive 
$100,000 annually. In most cities, a building of such a size 
would cost only $125,000 to build, and the money would be 
raised by an issue of four per cent thirty-year bonds. The 
building would be nearly worthless in thirty years unless 
repaired and renewed at a total cost, let us say, of $60,000. 
In thirty years, we have, therefore, a total cost of $335,000 
for the building; that is, $11,167 annually. Of this amount, 
the $150,000 paid in interest was a concession to the spirit 
of the regime which desires to build up a class of money- 
lords ; therefore, instead of paying as we go, we seize every 

* A similar argument may be made for church and religion. This is, in 
no sense, a revival of the State-Church, but the exact contrary, — a 
church as vi^ide as the State, but absolutely free from it. The extension of 
the principle to Business is obvious. 



192 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

opportunity to postpone payment and to pay later in full with 
interest added. Besides the $11,167 annually for the build- 
ing, we have been paying in cash, not by loan-proceeds, per- 
haps $20,000 annually for thirty-two or thirty-three teachers, 
and $2500 to $3000 for apparatus, books, stationery, and 
supplies.! 

The other aspect of this matter is that unless the teachers 
are sufficiently numerous, competent, and industrious, — in 
other words, unless they have been selected with sufficient 
intelligence and conscientiousness and receive high enough 
salaries to command genuine talent, — from mere weight of 
the barbarism and ignorance congenital in each generation, 
the civilization in that particular community will relapse into 
a lower form. 

3. Administration that employs its resources and agencies 
unwisely, whether by ill-directed or misdirected rules and 
regulations, or by unintelligent methods of enforcement or of 
execution, or by incompetent selection of subordinates, is sin- 
ful, if not also criminal. For the incompetent to secure or to 
accept office beyond their powers, while frequent enough, is 
none the less wicked, because the progress of society is at 
stake. 

4. Administration that fears to advise any legislation or 
advises legislation unwisely is guilty of a social offense whose 
very magnitude saves it from the condemnation deserved. 

In American education, administration is the vi^eakest 
and worst spot. The best administration cannot immedi- 
ately prevail over bad legislation, but it can recommend 
better legislation. Good school laws often fail utterly for 
want of good men to carry them out. 

Two other topics remain, supervision and instruction 
as educational instruments. Good administration fails 

^ It is a striking commentary upon the complete unworldliness of most 
teachers, — and their consequent unfitness to fit boys and girls for the 
world of real affairs, — that only a few of them ever have the slightest 
notion as to the cost of the building in which they teach ; or of the total 
or per capita wealth of their community; or even of the salaries of any 
other school employees. 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 193 

unless carefully followed out and supervised. We hear, 
it is true, certain reactionaries who, seeing the truth that 
the one thing needful is to give the child a competent 
teacher, imagine that they may go directly to this end. 
They forget that, as a matter of history, it has been 
found necessary to establish this special complex system 
which they so decry. No doubt, without any legislation 
or administration or supervision, some children would 
have good teachers. At least for a time, were all our 
legislators, administrators, and supervisors to be done 
away, some parents would maintain private teachers. 

In milder form, some critics urge that principals, super- 
visors, and board members should be clerks to execute 
the will of the teachers. It is no adequate reply that 
chaos might come again since each teacher would prob- 
ably have a will of his own (or her own). Such indi- 
vidualism might tend to the discovery of genius among 
teachers and among pupils. But it is an adequate reply 
that society has the right to the largest service of the 
best teachers and that class-room instruction limits such 
service. The very first purpose of supervision is to 
discover genius and talent and to set these to larger 
tasks. The supervisor is simply a teacher of teachers 
in order that, if possible, every child shall certainly have 
competent instruction. 

Good legislation may encourage but cannot insure 
good administration; this in turn may encourage but 
cannot insure good supervision. On the contrary, super- 
vision, bad in quality, or insufficient in quantity, nullifies 
good administration and good legislation. When we 
reach instruction, the actual presence of the living, 
genuine teacher in the classroom of pupils, we come upon 
an enigma. Laws, administration, supervision may all be 
bad ; and yet for a time in some spots in a school system, 
the instruction may be good. I repeat, for a time, in 
some spots. I may go a Httle farther and say that all 



194 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

the time in some class-rooms or in others there is some 
good teaching. However bad the system, a few good 
teachers are bound, from time to time, to creep in. Of 
these few, here and there one will bear up for a year, for 
a decade, perhaps even for a lifetime, against all the 
poverty of resources, paucity of ideas, and pride of opinion 
of the worst State legislators, municipal board members, 
and city superintendents and principals. Why? Good 
teaching is entirely natural to some persons, a product 
of their character, disposition, scholarship. It bubbles 
out of them a sweet, strong stream of truth and wisdom. 
Such a spring cannot be filled up or dug out or polluted. 
It purifies all around it. Pupils, parents, citizens, protect 
the good teacher from oppression, and encourage him in 
his work not only by responding in their own characters, 
but also by social support and sympathy. 

But the exceptional cases must not blind us to the 
general fact. This nation needs now for its eighty-five 
million people eight hundred and fifty thousand teachers, 
twice as many as it actually has. Nature and the School 
have not hitherto conspired to produce all teachers, 
"born to teach" and fitted to teach well against all 
odds. Perhaps in the ten teachers actually here, in the 
twenty really needed, one has the native gifts. The 
others must be carefully trained and informed, con- 
stantly encouraged, directed, and assisted, and generously 
supported in materials, buildings, and personal salaries. 
Supervision is the mode of raising and keeping up to 
a reasonable standard the many who are teachers by 
necessity and by special preparation. Not that the nat- 
ural teacher does not need special preparation and even 
frequent counsel, but that he or she is always eager to 
progress. Such a teacher is always an advocate and 
upholder of competent supervision, and by that same 
token is apt to be a critic and denouncer of incompetent 
supervision. 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 195 

1. Supervision that discourages good instruction is danger- 
ous in proportion to its meddlesomeness. It often, perhaps 
usually, restrains in the teacher the very qualities desired in 
the child, — self-activity, range of effort and of interest, and 
self-reliance. 

2. Supervision that " tithes mint, anise and cummin " and 
forgets " the weightier matters " is a nuisance and may be a 
danger.^ 

3. Supervision that does not understand its true relations to 
the making of laws, to administration, to teachers, to parents, 
to pupils, and to the general public prevents better supervision 
from doing its good work in the particular instance and is 
responsible for the slow acceptance of competent supervision 
as a present, insistent educational need. 

Though often associated in current educational prac- 
tice with special instruction, supervision is a very dif- 
ferent matter. Giving lessons to pupils and giving 
lessons to teachers are very good exercises in prepa- 
ration for supervision, which is typically seeing lessons 
given by teachers to pupils. Of course, supervision is a 
far larger matter than this only, but it centres upon 
this.2 

It is the business of instruction to bring to the pupil 
information that he needs to know, is capable of learn- 
ing, and may at the particular time learn without con- 
fusion of ideas ; to supply this information in such 
a manner as thereby to develop his interests and his 
powers ; to present to him truth and principle in forms 

1 Jesus, Matthew, Gospel xxiii, 23. 

"If a man may lawfully prefer a known lesser good before a greater, 
and be justified because the lesser is a real good, then he may be feeding 
his horse though he knows that he should be saving the life of his child 
or neighbor, or quenching a fire in the city." Baxter, Works, vol. vi, 
p. 366. 

2 Chancellor, (9?/r Schools: Their Administrafiojt ajtd Supervision^ 
chapters iv and vii. In general, one supervisor is needed for every ten 
teachers, and special supervisors are desired for all new incoming subjects 
and exercises. 



196 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

of beauty so that he will desire yet more truth ; ^ to 
destroy in him instincts and habits popularly known as 
"evil;" and to exercise, and thereby to develop, in him 
ofood instincts and habits. The business of instruction 
is, indeed, much more than this. The present book is 
but an epitome of some phases of the social function and 
individual opportunity of the teacher. 

Instruction, considered only as an educational instru- 
ment, is the last process in the mechanics of education. As 
in the cases of legislation, of administration, and of super- 
vision, what is good instruction may perhaps be best seen 
by a dogmatic presentation of bad or poor instruction. 

1. Instruction that by methods of compulsion discourages 
spontaneity in any of its phases — origination, invention, 
interest, self-expression — defeats the very purpose of educa- 
tion, which is unfolding of powers. 

2. Instruction that does not relate in psychological and 
physiological order courses, subjects, topics, details, inci- 
dentals, produces confusion and distress where clearness and 
delight are all-essential.^ 

3. Instruction that improperly evaluates in relation to the 
particular class, and so far as possible the particular child, 
the yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, and moment-by- 
moment studies, exercises, and recreations is incompetent in 
the degree and number of its errors. 

4. Instruction that does not day by day advance the pupil 
in the organization of knowledge, in the arts of using it, in 
self-knowledge, and in self-control, — that does not day by' 
day advance him in the faith that the world is a cosmos with 
a universal unity, and in the understanding that he ought to 
harmonize and unify himself as an integral, independent soul, 
free from the snares of the world, — fails in its mission. 

^ " The True is what man holds to be ; the Beautiful, what he desires 
and holds ought to be ; the Good, the choice and use of the proper means 
for passing from the True to the Beautiful." Davidson, Histoyy of 
Education, p. 16. 

2 " Education is a process not of accumulation, but of assimilation." 
Hughes, The Making of Citizens, p. 18. 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 197 

5. Instruction that does not subordinate discipline and 
management to its own higher ends makes spirit subordinate 
to mechanism, which is disloyalty, ignorant or malicious, to 
the very nature of this Universe. 

6. Instruction that exalts into ends the means of education 
— the school arts, information, drill, the recitation, discipline, 
books, laboratories, buildings — leads the School into a ciil 
de sac. 

Let us imitate in order to invent ; reproduce in order to 
originate ; learn words in order to know the things, the drama, 
the relations for which the words stand ; examine forms in 
order to understand substance and meaning \ observe facts 
in order to discover their causes and their effects ; and let us 
remember all the while that the purpose, as Browning said, is 
to help the child and youth to "educe the man." 

In all these matters of school legislation, administra- 
tion, supervision, and instruction, there are certain con- 
siderations of a qualitative nature. In view of the vast 
pressure up(?n each social institution and upon each indi- 
vidual from contemporaneous affairs and people and from 
ancient traditions, it is not true in letter or in spirit that, 
provided education is maintained, the best legislation, 
administration, supervision, or instruction is the least, 
and that, therefore, the fewer laws and legislators, rules 
and administrators, methods and supervisors, books, ex- 
ercises, and teachers, the better. Rather is it true that, 
because of this pressure, we need certain measures de- 
signed not primarily to improve education, but designed 
to defend education from external attack. Nevertheless 
so vast is the work to be done, the knowledge to be de- 
livered to youth, the range of habits and insights to be 
acquired, and so slight, at best, are the individual powers 
of teacher and pupil, — who in every last analysis, what- 
ever be the criteria, constitute the School, — that legis- 
lation, administration, supervision, and instruction should 
proceed with measures and men as direct, as clear, and as 
few as are absolutely necessary to get the work well done. 



198 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

To specify by way of illustration, 

1. A great body of State school laws by no means indicates 
a high quality of legislation. The mere mass is in itself an 
embarrassment. 

2. Similarly, the local board of education that promulgates 
many rules and regulations probably has an actually worse 
school system than one that promulgates few. The very 
smallness of their number tends to the careful consideration 
of each item. 

3. A State with a State board of education, a State board 
of examiners, and various other State boards, all composed of 
laymen, and each board assigned to some particular State 
school, has diffused responsibility too widely. All these ama- 
teurs will have so little experience as never to become even 
semi-professional.^ 

4. Similarly, a State with many county superintendents 
rather than a few State inspectors will suffer because the 
supply of really fine administrators is always small. 

5. A large local board of education — any number over 
seven members, the more than seven the worse — by no 
means indicates a sufficiency of competent thought given by 
the representatives of the public or by the delegates of the 
mayor to t^e problems of the schools.^ It is true that an 
able, honest, and courageous school superintendent can split 
and therefore control a large board more easily than a small 
one, — a fact that makes the large corrupt board less danger- 
ous than a small corrupt one, — but this truth constitutes an 
additional argument against the large board because such 
efforts by the superintendent consume time and energy that it 

1 After a year's experience as a board member, in a certain city, the 
amateur *' corrected " an opinion of the city superintendent, saying, " I 
have looked carefully into this matter ; in fact, I spent an evening in con- 
sultation with So-and-So [another amateur] ; and I am quite as competent 
as you to decide the principles involved." To which the superintendent 
replied, " I will not express any doubt as to the superior value of your 
opinion and that of So-and-So ; but I venture to suggest that you will 
find it rather hard to persuade the people of this city to prefer your 
opinion to mine." 

2 Where the board of education does not construct and repair the 
school buildings, the number of members should never exceed three. 



EDUCATIONAL INSTRUMENTS 199 

should be possible for him to devote to directly educational 
work. The compact, small, corrupt board that cannot be made 
respectable by the corrections of a school superintendent also 
cannot avoid public responsibility for its acts and failures to 
act. In America, whether the small corrupt board is ap- 
pointive or elective, it can seldom last long. As a matter of 
fact, small boards are almost always of a much higher average 
quality of character, intelligence, and efficiency than the large 
boards. Mere size invites graft, pull, influence, chicanery, 
and oratory, and deceives the public. Moreover, the board of 
many members, each desiring something to do or to get, in- 
evitably trespasses upon the domain of the educational staff. 
6. Let us beware of the seducing power over the imagina- 
tion of large numbers, such as large expenditures per capita 
of pupils, large number of teachers per pupil, large invest- 
ments in school buildings per capita of pupils, great variety 
of courses and of enterprises. The presumption, and the pre- 
sumption only, is in favor of the large numbers. The cost per 
capita in a city may rise in three decades fifty or a hundred 
per cent, and yet the actual schooling be worse. The teachers 
may be drawn from inferior social classes, principals and 
superintendents may be mere educational mechanics, text- 
books may be unwisely, even corruptly chosen, marking, 
grading, and promotion may have become purely a mathe- 
matical routine, and the daily programme a mere concatena- 
tion, badly proportioned at that. 

It would appear from the various foregoing considera- 
tions that, in the formal system of education, the chief 
difficulty in the proper constitution and correlation of 
these educational instruments — legislation, administra- 
tion, supervision, and instruction — arises invariably 
from the activity and authority of the layman, of the 
educational amateur, and of the semi-professional. Such 
persons as individuals should have absolutely no political 
or legal or other rights save the financial in education,* 

^ And then only as the delegates of the people, as representatives, not 
as mdividuals. 



200 THE MACHINERY OF EDUCATION 

for they certainly have none in sound morals. To say 
this is not to challenge democracy ; on the contrary, it 
is to assert the only democracy historically and philoso- 
phically right, the democracy of general society. To em- 
ploy as a teacher for a class of children one who is not 
professionally equipped as a teacher, and formally recog- 
nized as such by the best teachers, is not democracy, but 
sheer, perverting tyranny. To empower ten, or twenty 
laymen, who claim to be nothing more, to select and- 
employ teachers, to establish courses of study, to make 
rules and regulations, in short, to conduct education, is 
not democracy but mind-slaughter, tempered by the 
protests of educators and of parents. As an institution, 
education is essentially, and therefore necessarily, an 
hierarchy. The democracy of society should control 
education not by wanton interferences at any and every 
point from the State legislature to the kindergarten 
class, but solely as an institution, as it controls Property, 
Family, Church, and Business. The separation in Amer- 
ica of Church and State, formally established in our 
Constitutions, must, of course, be upon a somewhat dif- 
ferent line from that which is to separate State and 
School : but the separation must not be, therefore will 
not be, any the less complete. 



PART THREE 

THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Genius is formed in solitude, character in the stream of the world. 
— Goethe, Torquato Tasso. 



CHAPTER XI 

INTELLIGENCE 
(a) OBSERVATION. (3) LITERACY 

Concerning an educated individual we may fairly ask, — Can he see straight ? Can he 
recognize a fact ? Has he self-control ? or do his passions run away with him ? or unto- 
ward events daunt him? Does he continue to grow in power and in wisdom throughout 
life ? — Eliot, More Money for the Public Schools, p. 64. 

When 
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge 
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, 
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth — 
'T is then we get the right good from a book. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. 

That all knowledge is derived from the senses was 
proved by Hume and interpreted by Kant in works that 
laid the foundations for modern metaphysics and psy- 
chology.^ Modern educational theory, however, seems to 
have neglected to note the significance of this truth. 
Fortunately, educational practice, because in the English 
race it issues from tradition (which in origin is near to 

1 Hume : "The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensa- 
tion " (§ 2). " All belief of matter of fact or real existence is derived merely 
from some object present to the sense or memory" (§ 5). " But as to the 
causes of these general causes, — the ultimate causes of natural opera- 
tions and phenomena, — these are totally shut up from human curiosity 
and enquiry" (§ 2). A7t Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. 

Kant : " It may well be that experience is itself made up of two elements, 
one received through impressions of sense, and the other supplied from 
itself by our faculty of knowledge on occasion of those impressions " {Cri- 
tique of Pure Reason, § i). "Beyond the limits of experience, space and 
time have no meaning whatever, for they are only in the senses, and have 
no reality apart from them " ( Transcendental Analytic, § 23). " The cate- 
gories, as proceeding from understanding, contain the grounds of the pos- 
sibility of any experience whatever" {Op. cit. supra, § 27). 



204 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

common sense), has not entirely failed to incorporate in 
its methods and devices the logical conclusion. If all 
knowledge is derived from experience, which obviously 
is occasioned and conditioned by sensation, then educa- 
tion should develop accuracy, fullness, variety, keenness, 
— in short, truthfulness, — of the senses of the individual 
who is to be educated. Moreover, this truthfulness of 
the senses, this knowledge from experience, this near- 
ness of the mind to the world, is the foundation of the 
entire structure of the soul, a foundation, therefore, de- 
pendent upon its own qualities for its solidity, its depth, 
and its extension. 

In education, we have been too much wont to accept, 
unquestioned, whatever the senses have reported as being 
correct and complete ; unquestioned, the ability of the 
body to develop these senses adequately without direction 
of the mind ; unquestioned, the continued veracity of the 
senses irrespective of the mode of life to which in school, 
at home, and everywhere else, we may subject the body. 
When, therefore, the college professor of physical or 
natural science asserts that this boy or girl, entering his 
class after a dozen years of elementary and secondary 
schooling, cannot see an object truly, we have been sur- 
prised. And yet as in the case of so many other matters 
of surprise, the true surprise is that after such schooling 
and such other civilized environment of the pupil, we, the 
educators, should be surprised at this fact, for we do 
not found our education upon the only sure foundation 
of truthful sense-reporting. We have made two errors : 
first, we have taken truthful sense-reporting as a meta- 
physical matter, a necessary condition of a mind in the 
world, a thing of original certainty and not of empirical 
development ; and, second, we have supposed that because 
savages in their natural lives learn to see, to hear, to 
smell, to taste, to feel accurately, so must also the civil- 
ized man, a noji seqinticr, a fallacy dangerous to the phys- 



INTELLIGENCE 205 

ical welfare of the race, a positive source of degeneration. 
We forget that the savage must have accurate senses or 
die ; but because we see that the senses alone will not and 
cannot protect the civilized man, we neglect them almost 
entirely and rely upon food laws, police, books, and a 
thousand other assurances of civilized society, mostly on 
paper and not effective in reality, to protect child and 
man from death and other danger. 

So utterly vain and superficial have we become in our 
consideration of the sensational life of man as to suppose 
that the special objective senses are the only senses of 
any value, small as their values are. But man has many 
senses beyond the ''five." Probably every section of 
his skin, every region of his body, every psychosis and 
every neurosis, has a special sense-organ to record it, is 
indeed a special sense. Lucky folk are those who sense 
danger ; fortunate folk those who sense the future ; good 
folk those who sense the very desires of others ; mag- 
netic folk those who sense the dispositions of others.* 
The old notion that intelligence functions somewhere in 
the body is utterly inadequate to explain the observed 
phenomena of soul-life. ^ 

In general, to be really intelligent we must be ac- 
quainted with the operations (i) of the special senses so 
called, of which in civilization vision is perhaps the most 
important, for we are now an eye-minded race ; (2) of 
the general senses, of which temperature is now of great 
significance ; (3) of the sympathetic nervous senses, the 
metabolism of which is of very great importance to a 
creature with a mind constantly draining its body of ner- 
vous energy ; (4) of the organic senses, of which aeration 

1 Jastrow, Hall, Myers, Maeterlinck, Titchener, James, Hyslop, Aiken, 
Gould, Mitchell, and many other writers upon psychology and upon 
medicine, have opened up this subject, which is yet deep in the ore. 

2 Man has over 40,000 sense-organs and receives over 40,000 different 
kinds and degrees of sensations. Titchener, Outlines of Psychology, p. 67. 



2o6 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

or blood-oxygenation is absolutely vital, as the statistics 
of tuberculosis warn us ; ^ (5) of the life-currents, periodici- 
ties,^ tides of will, of emotion, of revery ; (6) of lethargy, 
of ecstasy, of fatigue, of all manner of warnings. Of all 
these, the watchword is not to suppress but to exercise 
or to inhibit, that we may know and understand the body 
by which and in which we live. It is a far more useful 
tool than most of us yet know. And we do not yet know 
what it really is.^ We do not know how food supplies 
life, or what the matter in food or the energy in it really 
is. A whole new physiology is now coming to be.* 

It is not, however, to the introspective or subjective 
aspects of this matter that the attention of educators 
should chiefly be directed, but to its objective and ex- 
ternal aspects. The business of the soul is to look 
forth upon the world, to know it, and to include it. In- 
telligence begins with observation (which is not merely 
a matter of the eye) ; and intelligence, the power to 
bring together within one's self various facts, is the 
beginning of the life of the soul — as every observer of 
babies knows, whether a mother looking on with pas- 
sionate love or a scientist looking on with dispassionate 
candor. The world awakens the spirit sleeping in the 
stranger, totally ignorant of this particular environment. 

To acquire power of correct observation, certain courses 

^ Lankester, Kingdom of Mait. 

2 Herein lie the fearful sex-problems of civilized humanity. Hall, Ado- 
lescence, chapter vii. 

^ "We cannot say just when the food we take becomes no longer a 
foreign substance to be acted upon, but part of the true physical self and 
endowed itself with assimilative power, nor can we say when tissues on 
the down road of decay cease to be the true physical self, any more than 
the psychologist can tell when the matter of apperception becomes an 
organ by it." Hall, Adolescence, p. 29. 

* Atwood, Wiley, and many others. Le Dantic, Nature and Origin of 
Life. Collaterally, we are developing a new system of therapeutics, — to 
protect life by raising the body to yet higher vitality. Health is the true 
prophylactic against disease. 



INTELLIGENCE 207 

are necessary : first, to " sense " the thing ; second, to 
compare it with other things ; third, to separate it from 
other things (that is, to see its hkeness and unhkeness); 
fourth, by recollection to reproduce it accurately in the 
imagination ; fifth, to name it ; and sixth, to recall it by 
its name or symbol. The baby begins the process ; the 
old man dies before completing it with reference to 
more than a very, very small fraction of all the possible 
things to be " sensed " or observed in this world. Unfor- 
tunately, after the child comes to school, often he finds 
not assistance in this necessary physio-psychological 
enterprise, but every hindrance conceivable by direct 
human ingenuity or permissible to human blundering. 
It is this truth-finding talent that the school destroys. 
Fortunately, we have begun to recognize our mortal sin. 

Let the child paint the flower that he sees. 

Let him sing the rhythmic sound that he hears. 

Let him carve the block that he feels. 

Let him tell the event that of his own senses he knows. 

Let him dramatize the actions that fill his imagina- 
tion. 

And every moment let us teach ourselves to observe, 
that we may no longer lead the child astray. 

Let us encourage sheer truthfulness ; it is the gold 
coin that purchases intelligence. The truth-finding boy 
has the first mortgage, warranty and quit-claim trust, 
upon success in the real world. The truth-finder dis- 
covers out in the world his true self, the larger person 
that he hopes to become, for truth is the proper home 
of the soul. 

Indubitably, this establishment of sense-training as 
the basis of the conscious evolution of intelligence, this 
teaching that natural observer, the child, to observe sys- 
tematically, rejecting illusions, errors, and accidents 
and seeking always the real, the right, and the usual or 
universal, this education of the knower, the scientist, in 



2o8 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

man will be accomplished only by correcting the theory 
of education and reforming its methods and practices ; 
because in this world despite appearances, in the world 
behind appearances, in the world of truth, as soon as 
truth is found, we obey. Sense-training, however, though 
the first educational end, is only a mediate process in 
the schooling of the child ; and like every other mediate 
process of value, it serves not only general uses but cer- 
tain particular uses, — in this case, it serves the partic- 
ular use of leading directly to hearing, to reading, and 
to speaking words, that is, to literacy. 

To say that thought is expressed in words and by means 
of words is to understate the truth, for thought and language 
are warp and woof of that knowledge with which in this world 
the soul clothes itself. Without words to receive and to hold 
one's ideas, one must forever repeat his thinking ; and can- 
not go forward. Language is the structure by which man 
builds himself heavenward. He sustains himself at each 
higher stage by these crystalline formulas of thought which 
we call words. 

The purpose of the School is to enlarge, to hasten, and 
to insure the development of personality, which is self- 
knowledge through world understanding, which is indi- 
viduality clothed with wisdom regarding Nature and 
human nature, which is the social man, which is the self- 
respecting man intelligently at work in the world, which 
is the soul in the presence of God and the works of God, 
which is the man redeemed from the body,^ from the 
past,^ from hate of his neighbor,^ from all particular fears 

1 " And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the passions 
and lusts." Paul, Galatians v, 24. 

2 The familiar doctrine of regeneration, as expressed in the story of 
Nicodemus. Jesus, John, Gospel rii, T-21. 

3 The neighbor-philosophy of Christians so bitterly reviled by Scho- 
penhauer, Hartmann, Nietzsche, and Weininger : perhaps best expressed 
in the parable of the "Good Samaritan." Jesus, Luke, Gospel x, 29-37. 



INTELLIGENCE 309 

and affections through one complete f ear ^ and one ab- 
sorbing love for the All-father.^ 

The word literate as applied to persons means able to 
recognize letters, that is, able to read. An illiterate can- 
not read and, of course, therefore cannot write. More 
broadly, we imply by illiteracy that the person cannot 
read and write with any accuracy or facility. But the 
term may properly be taken much more broadly. To 
speak affirmatively, he is literate who can read with un- 
derstanding and who can write, adequately expressing 
himself thereby. 

The first element in reading is to associate a sound 
with a sign. The r means the rolling sound. The r 
sounded recalls the r signed in either script or print. 
This association, which consists of a new sensation re- 
calling and interpreting a former sensation, is the famil- 
iar " apperception " of modern psychology ; but it is by 
no means so simple as it appears to be. No animals have 
ever been able to achieve it.^ The next element in read- 
ing is to associate with something else the r sounded 
and signed; this something else may be an object of 
the senses or an abstract relation, itself difficult and com- 
plicated. Consider such words as oar (a visible thing.), 
row (a visible action), are (a conjunctive relation), or (a 
disjunctive relation), and err (a mental act or quality). To 
be really literate, one must know all these matters. There 
is psychological substance here, sufficient for an entire 
book. In truth, just as no man has a complete life of the 
senses, so no one is completely literate, not even the poly- 
glot, not even the philosopher. And on the side of literate 
expression, the failure to be complete is even greater, for 

^ " The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Psalm cxi, 10; 
Proverbs i, 7 ; ix, 10. 

^ " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Jesus, Matthew, Gospel xxii. 37. 

3 In the case of the German horse " Hans," considerably exploited in 
the periodical literature of 1905, later tests exploded the notion that he 
can read and compute. His perceptive powers are, however, marvelous. 



210 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

while words once expressed are difficult to understand, 
it is far more difficult to put thought into them. In a 
certain aspect, therefore, with individuals it is simply 
the case of greater or less literacy and of less or greater 
illiteracy. In addition, there are the signal technical 
deficiencies of language in general and of every separate 
language in particular. The master of two languages 
can express himself more fully and acquaint himself 
more freely with the thoughts of others than can the 
master of one. To particularize, English needs forty-two 
different phonetic signs, while it has but twenty-six. 
Moreover, there are at least forty more simple and use- 
ful phonetic sounds known to other languages but un- 
known in English. And yet in respect to phonetic sounds, 
English is perhaps the broadest of all tongues, and no 
other language has more phonetic signs. Again, we have 
many unnecessary duplications of combinations of signs 
for sounds, as, for example, qit and kw (quart, awkward), 
cks and x (ducks, fox).^ 

The task, therefore, of acquiring literacy is twofold, 
involving reading and expression. And it resolves itself 
into three general stages : recognition and use of pho- 
netic signs as such, converting them into sounds, to- 
gether with converting sounds into signs, and association 
of signs and of sounds with ideas, broadly defined. We 
have an ill-considered notion that the first two stages 
belong to early childhood only ; and even go so far as to 
say that we should study not only English, but the so- 
called "foreign languages," before ten years of age. But 
the foreign languages that we have in mind are those 
employing our own phonetic signs. Few would argue in 

^ There are many, many other difficulties with languages. One is that 
words do not ring true to the thought in them. Our English word love is 
too short and dull in tone. Amor and Hebe are more beautiful, more sug- 
gestive of the content-meaning. Another difficulty is that sentences often 
blur and tangle thought. The literary artist is the one who most closely 
observes and most successfully overcomes these language-difficulties. 



INTELLIGENCE 211 

favor of studying Hebrew, or Sanskrit, or Chinese, or 
hieroglyphics and cuneiform in early childhood. In truth, 
we have crowded down upon childhood a very serious 
labor ; and we do not give children sufficient credit for 
their success in mastering what is in fact the most diffi- 
cult feat to be performed by the human mind, a feat in 
comparison with which art and music, war and business 
are indeed easy. Because story-telling, conversation, 
busy work, games under oral direction, and oral number 
eliminate one of the steps in this process, namely, the 
phonetic sign, they are coming to be regarded as the 
standard school work for children under eight years of 
age. The attempt to teach children of four and five to 
read and to write has been a conspicuous failure, and the 
attempt itself evidenced complete ignorance both of 
genetic physiology and of genetic psychology, which, of 
course, were practically unknown before 1875. Now, 
however, such ignorance on the part of educators is 
scarcely excusable. 

Not only are these things true ; but in our satisfaction 
with our extraordinary success in bringing nearly all 
children, even the mediocre, to phonetic literacy, we 
forget the third and vastly greater, the infinite, problem 
of perfect literacy through interpretation and expression. 
This is why our educational work with so many children 
over thirteen or fourteen years of age has been a total 
failure. Consider the fact that most boys and girls desire 
to leave school at these ages. Of a hundred boys and 
girls in school at eight years of age, we think that we 
do well to retain fifty at fifteen years of age and two at 
eighteen. Yet we know perfectly well that of the fifty 
children remaining after fifteen years of age at school, one 
half are present from parental compulsion of one kind 
or another. We know that the four-year high schools 
and academies do not contain any such numbers of chil- 
dren as do the four-year primary or even the four-year 



212 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

grammar grade schools. We flatter ourselves that the 
children are forced out of school by economic necessity 
or that they leave because they are dull. And yet we 
see every year the sons and daughters of day laborers, 
male and female, and dependent orphans graduating from 
the same secondary schools and even from the colleges ; 
and we see also very dull boys and girls surviving to win 
university degrees. 

Let us face the situation and look into it. Let us 
note that dire poverty has not wholly blocked the way 
of boys and girls of talent, and that sheer dullness is, if 
not curable, at least remediable by right teaching, as the 
career of many a well-to-do boy under tutors has proven. 
American democracy is founded upon the theory that 
poverty is not a bar, but only a barrier, to opportunity. 
Many a President and Governor has surmounted that 
barrier. And European monarchy is founded upon the 
theory that mediocrity may be instructed in the ways of 
kingship. Otherwise, hereditary Kaisers and Kings 
would have disappeared long ago. 

Still another feature of language requires consideration. 

It is a dilatory mode of expression and of interpretation. 
We think with a speed that would be incredible, were we 
not so familiar with the phenomenon. To speak and to 
write well, one must acquire the power to hold a thought 
in consciousness. By its natural constitution, not only 
is the mind dissipated, but exceedingly swift. We' must 
remember that thought does not require language or 
even action. The makers of literature have constructed 
many a tale to display how much a man may experience 
in but a few seconds of time. We are all aware of the 
range and speed of our thought in the course of very 
brief moments of sleep, as in a day-dream, or of excite- 
ment, as in rescue from drowning. In a certain sense, 
language impedes thought. It sets the mind in harness 
for the drawing of loads. Talleyrand said cynically that 



INTELLIGENCE 213 

language is given to disguise thought. But no amount 
of language and no skill, however great, in language can 
prevent the observer from getting the truth by the more 
natural modes of expression of face and of voice, of ges- 
ture and of manner. By its direct appeal to the eye, a 
picture tells its story with almost the speed and range of 
thought itself, almost eliminating time as a factor in get- 
ting the truth. And by its direct appeal to the ear, using 
no mediate signs, a tune without words (and therefore 
free from definition and limitation) floods all the soul. 

It is because of these considerations that we need in 
the formal system of education not only reading, writing, 
arithmetic, geography, and history, but also music, paint- 
ing, drama, and travel. 

But while language impedes thought as a process, it 
often marvelously condenses thought as a result. We 
can think in but a small, seemingly an infinitesimally 
small, part of the time required to find the words and 
to form the sentences that express our thinking. But 
when the thinking is ended and the words are chosen and 
arranged, we may have such a condensation of thought 
as amounts to a miracle and sets astir the wonder, the 
delight, the gratitude of many millions.* For hundreds 
of generations, men had been thinking hard in their de- 
sire to know the nature of God. Jesus answered their 
question, supplied the desire of their hearts, finished 
finally that inquiry when He declared the new synthesis, 
" God is love." 

To us is left the finding of the explanation. Because " God 
is love," and can desire for man only good,^ we should pray, 

^ ". . . jewels five-words-long, — 
That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time 
Sparkle for ever." 

Tennyson, TAf Princess, ii. 

2 Absolutely irrespective of the merits of the individual man. The rain 
comes upon the just and the unjust alike. Jesus, Matthew, Gospel v, 45. 



214 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

"Not my will but Thine be done." Philosophy may inquire 
how the God of love can tolerate evil, or whether all evil is 
but good in the making, or whether evil is necessary in order 
that good may come to pass; but it can never again inquire 
whether God is part good, part evil, an infinite conflicting 
chaos, for love is cosmic, and it is more credible that there 
is no God than that He is double-minded and unstable in 
his ways. Ages of thought are crystallized in those three 
words, "God is love;" ages yet to come are forthshadowed 
in them. 

In lesser matters, men have wrought with language 
wonders upon wonders. History, literature, philosophy, 
science employ the sentences of the masters as land- 
marks of progress. Revolutions and wars, poems and 
temples, constitutions and customs, these the masters of 
thought and of language have formulated in phrases that 
shall endure as long as the culture of man shall endure. 
They are bases and bulwarks for government, for 
religion, and for whatever else man requires in his unre- 
mitting effort to know and to realize himself as the 
"son of God." One very notable thing throughout the 
centuries has been the power of the really great men 
from Moses to Lincoln, from Buddha and Confucius to 
Mohammed and Luther, from Alexander to Bismarck, 
from Homer and Horace to Tennyson, Wordsworth, and 
Lowell, — in whatever craft their art consisted, — to find 
words big with meaning. The mastery of words, true 
literacy, seems almost an invariable condition of genius. 
It is now the vogue to consider a child who can pro- 
nounce his words a good reader. Many children, how- 
ever, are graduated from grammar schools as having 
properly completed an elementary education before they 
can pronounce even the ordinary words of newspaper 
articles and of periodical literature. 

We know well that such children have not yet acquired 
the capacity to understand modern civilization or to 



INTELLIGENCE 215 

express themselves in its terms. And yet this is by no 
means the worst of the situation. While one cannot 
miderstand a word that one cannot pronounce with at 
least some assurance of accuracy, one may pronounce 
with perfect accuracy many words that one does not un- 
derstand. Moreover, one may understand every word in 
a sentence and yet not understand the sentence ; every 
sentence in a paragraph, and yet not understand the 
paragraph ; and so on to an entire book or to an entire 
literature. 

When we do not understand words, we either ignore 
them or read into them false meanings. Similarly with 
sentences. So simple a sentence as "The truth shall 
make you free" has been read meaning "The truth of 
such-and-such a creed shall make you free from damna- 
tion " or "hell" or what not. In this book, there are 
many sentences that are incomprehensible to most per- 
sons because they are judgments upon notions, gener- 
alizations employing generalizing words, thoughts at their 
third or fourth power: for this reason, if for no other, 
few will read it, because we are seldom interested in 
what we do not quickly and easily understand. Most 
highly educated young men and women have gone on 
with their education partly from parental compulsion, 
partly from desire for the prestige of education, partly 
from hope of direct reward, and but little from pure 
desire to know and to be more.^ 

This matter of learning the meaning of words, their 
connotation and their denotation, and of learning the 
meaning of sentences has been almost entirely neglected 
in our elementary and secondary education. The college 
professor, generally scorned as a pedagogical ignoramus, 
is far more apt to take pains that his students shall un- 
derstand the words and the argument of his subject than 
is either the grammar grade or the high school teacher. 

^ " Is not this a mystery of life ? " Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, § 109. 



2i6 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

These latter need to go to school to the primary and the 
collegiate teachers. It is in the grammar grades and 
in the high school that the wreck of youth, voyaging 
upon the ocean of culture, comes. The American history 
or the geography, the Latin grammar or the geometry is 
thrust into the hands of the pupil, and he is told to learn 
that for which he has no apperceiving basis, no interest, 
and no desire. The practice is as deplorable as it is 
familiar. No wonder that boys leave school, preferring 
"to go to work," or that girls leave school, preferring to 
help their mothers and to get ready for marriage. 

This is what is meant by " over-enrichment " of the 
grammar school course and by " cramming " in the high 
school. Unfoptunately, a vicious circle has been formed. 
Our teachers have pursued grammar school and high 
school studies, and have then been prepared directly for 
primary work by a year or two in municipal or State 
normal schools. When "promoted" to grammar grade 
work, they forget to apply the primary grade principle of 
preparing the minds of the pupils for the new material, 
and apply instead the old practice of requiring book- 
study.^ The very books themselves, the courses of study, 
and the syllabi are all based on the theory that what 
words a child can pronounce he can understand ; or the 
even worse theory that what words he should be able to 
pronounce he does understand. 

What is the remedy } The kindergarten-and-primary 
and the university principle of studying and explaining 
words and sentences. It seems simple ; but it is not 
regarded as obligatory because essential, and it will not 
be so regarded for. many a year to come. But until it is 

1 Here is one point in the argument for college-trained teachers in the 
grammar grades. They have not learned methods and devices as such, 
but they have learned from their college teachers to reduce their topics to 
their elements, of which an important feature is the definition and exact 
use of words. 



INTELLIGENCE 217 

accepted, we shall continue to have a nation of men and 
of women who read the headhnes of newspapers and 
books of fiction written in easy words and reciting familiar 
deeds and motives ; in short, a nation really illiterate in 
respect to the greater matters of the social and the 
personal life. 

Nearly all, certainly nine in ten, Americans of West or 
North European stocks are entirely capable of attaining 
before nineteen years of age the literacy of high school 
graduates. It is entirely a matter of careful hygiene, of good 
teaching, and of continuance at school because of those good 
conditions. 

It is sometimes debated whether one may become 
truly efficient without being truly literate or literate 
without being efficient. An ugly conclusion seems per- 
missible when one accepts the affirmatives of these pro- 
positions, for if so, why not train one class of persons 
as literates but the mass as workers ? Whole civiliza- 
tions have been founded upon the notion that the few 
were born to rule and the many to serve. But if there 
can be no genuine literacy without efificiency and no 
great efficiency without literacy, then for each -person 
the one is as important as the other. Upon this analysis, 
literacy appears essentially and fundamentally a matter 
of observation and correct reporting, for to recognize a 
word, we must have seen it in all its literal elements and 
must recall it promptly and perfectly. Spelling is en- 
tirely a matter of truthfulness of seeing signs and hear- 
ing sounds, together with accuracy of recall. 

Similarly, it has been debated whether there can be 
morality without efficiency, with an even uglier conclusion, 
for if one may be moral without being good to do some- 
thing, then faith may be divorced from works,^ and if one 
may be ef^cient and yet immoral, then in the working 

1 James, Epistle ii, 14-26. 



2i8 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

world of men, virtue and vice are matters of indiffer- 
ence. Indeed, the saint becomes ridiculous, denying him- 
self the crowning pleasure of a will freed from law and 
become absolute.^ 

We have seen that literacy is not the narrow matter of 
ability to pronounce words, but that it includes the far 
greater matters of understanding the thought in lan- 
guage and of expressing one's own thought. The concep- 
tion, therefore, of literacy as a mode of education greatly 
lengthens the perspective of our thought. While we have 
not understood literacy, we have scarcely tried to under- 
stand the significance of efficiency and morality as also 
modes of education, not less important than literacy. 
We have said solemnly and almost universally that the 
illiterate is likely to be inefficient and immoral ; and yet 
we have not aimed at efficiency and morality as educa- 
tional ends. Our reasons for the neglect of these three 
essentials, a generous literacy, a worth-while efficiency, 
and a complete morality, have been various. Once un- 
derstood, these reasons will quickly show us how to dis- 
pose of the attendant difficulties. We have trusted to 
the individual to bring his word-recognizing literacy into 
the fruition of a thought-resolving literacy. This was safe 
enough in ages and conditions when the survival of the 
fittest among men involved the removal of the unfit by 
natural causes. In this age of towns and cities, the in- 
ner motivation of men is weak ; and millions are content 
to carry a primary-educated mind through life without 
further systematic and intentional development. The 
line of least resistance is easier for the citizen than for 
the savage. There is a parasitic sessilism in both rural 
and urban modern life that could never characterize any 
kind of primitive man. 

1 " All truth by itself is dead, — a corpse. It is alive only in the same 
way as my lungs are alive : to wit, — in the measure of my own vitality." 
Stirner (Byington, transl.), The Ego a7id His Own. 



INTELLIGENCE 219 

The failure of efficiency to appear at its full value as 
an ideal in education and in life is due to the inability of 
educators and other leaders of human thought and prac- 
tice to shut themselves out of their view of the world. 
Shakespeares may forbid themselves, may prohibit their 
own personalities from appearing in the foregrounds of 
their thoughts ; but the Shakespearean type is seldom 
displayed in the world. Men who are efficient find it diffi- 
cult to understand why others are inefficient or, what is 
worse, why others do not even desire to be efficient. The 
workers of the world have supposed that any man ''with 
brains " would desire to work ; they have, therefore, set 
about equipping men "with brains," that is, with liter- 
acy, whereas in point of fact civilized man, weakly be- 
gotten and conceived, overcrowded, oversocialized, and 
underfed, is more apt to be short of will than of intelli- 
gence. We may as well recognize now as later that as 
book and pen are necessary for literacy, so food and tool 
are necessary for efficiency. In most cases, the weak and 
shifting will evidences the need of better blood and of 
persistent work. 

The case of morality is somewhat different. We have 
neglected to teach this as an essential mode of education 
because most of our women teachers are mere girls who 
have not experienced the sterner realities of life, because 
most of our pupils are entirely too young to understand 
or appreciate the moral situations of men and women, 
because we have a too fond faith that one who attains 
the school virtues and the boy and girl virtues is there- 
fore certain to attain the virtues of maturer life, and be- 
cause we have fondly and foolishly supposed that an " edu- 
cated " man — that is, one who can read, write, cipher, 
locate the chief cities of the world, tell the causes of the 
Revolutionary War, and draw a box in perspective — is 
certain to be moral unless he is a "genius." We have 
understood, of course, that Napoleon, Heine, Shelley, 



220 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Poe, Webster, and Jay Gould were " geniuses " and, 
therefore, exempt from this or that moral law. What we 
have refused to recognize, perhaps have been unable to 
see, is that the great majority of men are not observant 
and literate, are not efficient, are not moral. And we 
have not taken the trouble to inquire, first, whether there 
is any connection between intelligence, efficiency, and 
morality, and whether there is any essential relation be- 
tween these desiderata and education. Let us, therefore, 
pursue this very inquiry. 

We have seen what intelligence is, — the power to col- 
lect facts and to interpret them, — and that, in civiliza- 
tion, literacy is an essential condition of intelligence. 
And we have seen what literacy is, — the power to inter- 
pret the thought in language and to express a thought by 
language. What is efficiency ? The power to make some- 
thing out of other things, the power to put things forth, 
the power to do, — that is, creative, constructive, complete 
power. It is a power resident in the human creature 
wherever he is and however he is circumstanced ; and 
he now happens to be characteristically in civilization, 
in society, among men. The modern efficient man must 
be a doer among many others, a laborer in society, a co- 
worker, a cooperator. Izaak Walton, fisherman, would 
probably be inefficient in modern London, and Daniel 
Boone, hunter, in New York. The day of the efficient 
independent has long since gone by. At the present 
time, efficiency connotes society and civilization. In 
other words, personal efficiency in civilization is social 
efficiency. 

By no amount of travel and sight-seeing can a tool- 
educated deaf mute boy be made as efficient as he can 
by a reasonable training in reading and writing. It is by 
language that one enspheres himself in humanity, orien- 
tates himself in civilization, measures the currents and 
eddies of society. One may be industrious without being 



INTELLIGENCE 221 

efficient. There is plenty of work without wages, plenty 
of opportunity for play, which is activity for its own 
sake, plenty of effort without result, plenty of trying 
without making. Efficiency is making something worth 
while. It has a concrete aspect as of things definite. 
Abstract efficiency, efficiency disembodied, is inconceiv- 
able. By definition, efficiency is economic in whole or in 
part. He who is efficient modifies the social structure or 
influences its welfare. He shoots at a mark and hits it. 
He is a man among men. He has a function and per- 
forms it. As for the inefficient, whether men or women, 
they are puppets, ciphers, " nobodies," parasites, paupers, 
" ne'er-do-weels," dependents. 

Efficiency is the health of the will, inefficiency its 
disease. Contrary to what seems the popular and even 
the professional view, one is no more born efficient than 
one is born literate or, for that matter, moral. But while 
one may become literate without proceeding to become 
efficient, in civilization one may not become efficient 
without first being literate. To know how to do things 
that are worth while, one must first learn by conversa- 
tion and by reading what things are worth while. Of 
course, language is the medium for acquiring this know- 
ledge. The larger the literacy the larger is the possible 
efficiency, for one may not be socially efficient beyond 
the range of his knowledge. Intelligence is conditioned 
by literacy, and in turn conditions efficiency. 

As every one knows, " well-read " men and women are 
sometimes useless. They may be only time-spenders, 
critics, bookworms, recluses. The mere literate is al- 
ways in peril of lunacy, mind-wandering, intellectual 
dissipation. The remedy is to keep the child quite as 
much at observing, doing, and making as at reading and 
speaking ; and there is no other remedy. Eye-training 
and ear-training must go hand in hand with muscle- 
training and body-building ; and must not outrun them 



222 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

far. Very likely, this means reducing the time given in 
school to reading, to history, and to geography ; very 
likely, together with the insistence of a sound pedagogy 
that whatever is studied must be understood, this means 
a considerable reduction of the amount of reading, of 
history, and of geography to be acquired in the ele- 
mentary school course; but the powers to observe and to 
do and skill in observing and in doing are cheaply bought 
at the price of losing some book-knowledge, too often 
essentially beyond the comprehension of the inefficient. 

We must have teachers sufficiently self-alienated, suf- 
ficiently bred away from the school and familiar with 
the world, to understand what efficiency is, and why it 
is exactly as essential as intelligence. It is not enough, 
even in the teacher, to be intelligent ; it is necessary 
also to be efficient. But the professional efficiency of 
the teacher is at best a narrow matter compared with 
the efficiency that should characterize the man or woman 
with work to do in the larger world outside of the school. 
We must have not only courses of study for the cultiva- 
tion of the intellect, but also courses of exercises for the 
cultivation of the will and of the body, which is the 
instrument for realizing the will. These courses must be 
as systematic, as progressive, and as prominent as the 
so-called culture studies. The price of efficiency in time 
and in intensity of effort is quite as great as is the price 
of intelligence. For the complete education, the second 
cost must be added to the first. 

Because the schools do not deliberately intend to teach 
efficiency is one reason why so many parents do not re- 
gret to see their children leave school " to go to work." 
A boy of fifteen should feel that he goes to work quite 
as much when he goes to school as when he goes to the 
mill or to the mine, to the farm or to the store, to the 
office or to the shop, to the railroad or to the factory. 
Of course, school work will never be primarily for the 



INTELLIGENCE 223 

purpose of earning money, though it is conceivable that 
in years to corne some school products may be commer- 
cially valuable. There is no good reason why children 
and youth should be trained in economic parasitism. In 
fact, so to train them is to imperil their desire for eco- 
nomic independence through life. Of course, in the pre- 
sent economic regime, most children and some v^ives 
and mothers are economic parasites, forever reaping and 
never sowing. It is plain that economic parasitism in 
luxury even beyond comfort is the ideal of millions, male 
and female, in this age, and small wonder that it is. A 
score of reasons might be given. Of these, I cite but one, 
— the others belonging rather in works on economics or 
in novels. This reason is educational. Our children are 
being brought up by mothers and by women teachers, 
all of whom are necessarily consumers, but most of whom 
are apparently non-producers.^ The fact of childhood 
tends to become the ideal of manhood and womanhood. 
Last and highest is morality. It is sometimes said 
that the ignorant man may be moral ; and even that the 
inefficient may be moral. We have presented to us the 
pathetic, appealing picture of the ignorant old woman, 
nodding over her Bible, as the type of morality. In life, 
it is not so. Feebleness and ignorance limit and obscure 
true morality. In a great civilization, morality is inevit- 
ably a complicated matter. To say this is not to say 
that the old lady who loves her Bible is not moral. She 
is probably moral within the limits of her intelligence 
and of her power to do good. But in the great world of 
action, where Nations are ruled. Syndicates are operated, 
Churches are organized, Schools are directed. Wars are 
waged, and Lands are peopled, every act should be not 
only wise and energetic but also righteous ; and the 

^ This regime is temporary. The signs of its passing are all about us. 
Some signs are good, some are evil. The worst of them is the forcing of 
mothers and children into the mills to force out the fathers. 



224 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

righteousness must be equal to the intelHgence and the 
energy. Morality in great matters looks simple only to 
the simple-minded, who are not competent to determine 
them. 

To illustrate : It is the verdict of history that the course 
pursued by Abraham Lincoln in regard to slavery during the 
War of Secession was the only righteous course ; and yet at 
the time most moralists reprobated that course. The truth is 
that only an able, strong-willed man in the Presidency, with 
all the knowledge given by that vast office and with a sense 
of responsibility proportioned to that office, could know what 
was right and what was wrong in the direction of national af- 
fairs in that crisis. As every competent person now agrees, 
there was apparently not one other man in America at the 
time who could have brought the Union through that crisis, — 
an almost unanimous opinion valuable as testimony to the 
fact that morality is the apex of the pyramid, resting upon 
efficiency, which in turn rests upon intelligence. 

We must clearly discriminate between the morality 
Aat lies within the range of a narrowly limited intelli- 
gence and within the strength of an incompletely efficient 
will, and the morality that is nearly or quite coterminous 
with a large intelligence and able to xvca pari pas sti with 
a quick and strong efficiency. We do not condemn as bad 
one who is as good as he knows how to be and as he has 
the energy to be. We are ready to forgive the ignorant 
and the feeble for their narrow and inactive morality. 
But it is our duty to ourselves and to society not to sup- 
pose, and not to speak and to act as though we supposed, 
that the morality of the dull and the weak is as noble 
and as valuable as the morality of the intelligent and 
the strong. A particular society soon perishes when the 
standard of morals of the majority is considered as the 
absolute standard for all. The excuse is sometimes of- 
fered by intelligent and vigorous men that their morality 
is as good as that of their neighbors. Those who offer 



INTELLIGENCE 225 

and those who accept that excuse forget that " unto 
whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much re- 
quired."^ 

It is this excuse that is offered by the great spoliators of 
American economic life. Their apologists say : " They are 
simply doing what you and I would do, were we in their 
places." To assert this is to admit two postulates, and I for 
one will not admit either. The first postulate is that all men 
of ability and energy aspire to wealth and power, irrespective 
of the morality of the methods employed to attain them. The 
second is that what is done in a small way is equally good or 
innocent when done in a large way. The first makes inex- 
plicable the poets, artists, physicians, journalists, professors, 
educators, and the thousand others who in each generation 
aspire neither to wealth nor to power, — inexplicable, that is, 
unless we are ready to agree that v/ealth and power are more 
to be desired than love and art, knowledge and consciousness 
of good service well done. The second denies the category 
of thought that " a change in quantity makes a change in 
quality." ^ To take a pin may be harmless ; but to take a case 
of many packages of pins may well be crime. 

The sociological view, therefore, of morality is appar- 
ently not the view of a certain familiar type of dogmatic 
theology. As God judges, the weak and ignorant man 
who does his best may be as good as the strong and 
intelligent man who does better. But society does and 
should value as the highest morality the life of one who, 
being wise and vigorous, conforms as closely as he may 
to the laws of social righteousness. 

To be specific : A weak and ignorant man may know that 
his party is corrupt, that the candidates are incompetent or 
venal, and that the measures are generally bad ; but he be- 
lieves that the other party is worse and that at any rate party 

^ Jesus, Luke, Gospel xii, 48. 

2 The contrary is a familiar fallacy, Cf. Hibben, " Popular Fallacies," 
North American Review^ April 19, 1907, pp. 832-3S. 



226 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

loyalty is an honorable personal characteristic, an evidence of 
being a good citizen. Another man, strong and intelligent, 
may know or believe all that the first one does ; and, instead 
of voting the straight ticket, quietly scratch a name here and 
there, hoping partly to secure better men by the substitutions 
and partly to rebuke his party managers for poor or bad 
selections; but all the while he knows that he ought to have 
gone to the primaries and to have fought the "slate," and, 
if defeated, ought to have fought the whole party pubhcly, 
perhaps even to the extent of assisting in the election of 
independent candidates. 

With the intelligent man v^ho is no more than this, 
whatever is true is accepted. With the efficient-intelli- 
gent man, whatever is accepted truth is urgent. With 
the moral-efficient-intelligent man, whatever is urgent 
and accepted truth is mandatory, obligatory, imperative, 
necessary ; and he obeys such truth as a duty. 

The business of culture is to find and to save the 
truth. The business of education is to bring men to 
knowledge of the truth, to acceptance of it, and to obe- 
dience to it. The record of culture in its business is 
better than the record of education. In nearly every 
generation of civilized peoples, there have been a few 
men, if not many, who have understood the mission of 
culture and who have followed it. But though education 
has had apostles in various lands at particular periods, 
until the rise of representative democracy in govern- 
ment and of evolution in science, education, as theory 
and practice, science and art, has not had an integral, 
self-conscious existence, nor has it had general recogni- 
tion either among the masses or among the wise. For 
want, therefore, of internal development and of unitary 
force and for want of public approval and support, educa- 
tion has scarcely undertaken all of its special business. 

In books on education and in reports of superintendents, 
there will be found expositions of efficiency and of morality 



INTELLIGENCE 227 

as educational ends and appeals for their recognition ; but in 
these academic discussions, there have been two unfortunate 
tendencies. Of these, the first tendency has been to translate 
both morality and efficiency in terms of each other and to say, 
therefore, that the literate will perforce be efficient and moral. 
Such translation amounts to a sophistical exchange of defini- 
tions. The second tendency, essentially and logically contra- 
dictory to the first, yet frequently presented collaterally, has 
been to assert that literacy, efficiency, and morality have 
the same educational motives, but that they may not be com- 
pletely achieved by the same educational methods. This leads 
to the employment of a few, as it were, " extra " methods to 
supplement the deficiencies of the standard methods for the 
achievement of literacy-efficiency-morality considered as one 
triune whole. But literacy-efficiency-morality are not a triune 
virhole, of which the fields of each of the three are coter- 
minous and therefore capable of being reached and occupied 
synchronously ; but the series should be intelligence-efficiency- 
morality, a progressive series, of which the first, a larger 
matter than literacy, is the pathway to the second ; and the 
second to the third ; while the third is the final, the real, and 
the necessary goal of elementary education. 

It remains to show by what methods and of what ma- 
terials intelligence, efficiency, and morality are consti- 
tuted. The perils of any civilization may be enumerated 
as three. The first is that its society will have an insuf- 
ficient number of intelligent men and women w^ho com- 
prehend its nature, purposes, and activities to preserve 
its culture without loss. Once net losses set in because 
of too general ignorance, the doom of that civilization 
is writ in the stars. The second peril is that its society 
will have an insufficient number of efficient men and 
women to perform skillfully its economic and cultural 
work and to preserve the per capita wealth and the aver- 
age culture undiminished. Once the cultural tone is 
lowered and the per capita wealth decreased, the doom 
is writ, and it will come sooner than when only the 



228 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

knowledge of culture is reduced. The third peril is that 
its society will contain an insufficient number of persons 
who exemplify in themselves and enforce in others the 
standard morals to preserve the cultural arts, the eco- 
nomic property, and the social habits unadulterated. 
Once cultural skill, private and public wealth per capita, 
and morals suffer injury to their essential nature, the 
doom of that civilization cometh fast. To increase intel- 
ligence is good; to develop efficiency is excellent; but 
to elevate morals is necessary. Increasing ignorance is 
ominous ; declining efficiency is frightful ; but lowering 
morality is fatal. 

Omens, fears, prophecies of doom pass unheeded when 
the civilization is on the wane. The disposition of a 
community of people to be joyous despite warnings, 
and to be callous amid miseries, is evidence that these 
diseases of ignorance, indolence, and evil — the anti- 
themes of intelligence, efficiency, and morality — have 
passed the stages of cure by normal process of internal 
change.^ 

Scholarship is a larger matter than " literary culture " 
or " knowledge of books " or " learning," all of which 
terms are but differ&nt modes of expressing the results 
of the stu(Jy of print. It implies these results and also 
working efficiency and disciphned morality, for despite 
much loose thinking and much careless talking, we know 
that unless the learned man is industrious and moral, he 
will not long pass for a genuine scholar in the world of 
unlearned but nevertheless critical men. The common 
sense of the many has maintained the truth ignored by 
the particular few who upon attaining literacy have im- 
agined their scholarship complete, for the many have 
looked upon the "mere scholar " scornfully, styling him 

1 It is precisely this general condition to-day in Russia that causes his- 
torically trained critics most anxiety. 



INTELLIGENCE 229 

"bookworm " or "unworldly" or idler, and have taken his 
opinions in "practical affairs" ("real life") as but bab- 
bling. Sometimes the many reproach the mere scholar 
(that is, one whose education has not gone beyond lit- 
eracy) as negligent of opportunities ; " dead to the 
world," they call him. Their remedy has been the ad- 
vice "to go and do something," "to get to work," to stir 
about among men. They do not know that the real 
trouble with the literate who is that but not more is 
subjective, characteristic, and in adult life almost always 
incurable. 

This real trouble may be stated in various ways. It is 
ignorance of the real world. It is literacy established 
upon very slight observation of natural things. It is 
lack of motor power. It is inhibition of the muscular or 
nervous reactions of thought. It is overdevelopment of 
reflection, which is, of course, impossible without some 
inhibition. It is knowing words but not things ; knowing 
without doing, so much knowing that doing has become 
impossible without extraordinary stimulation.^ It is loss 
of the sense of the practical. It is taking life as a day- 
dream. It is in substance and in spirit denial of reality. 
It is often stoicism.. It is flabbiness or vacuity of will. 
And whatever it is, it is always stated popularly in terms 
of the next higher quality, — efficiency. But the popular 
statement is superficial, fer the "mere literate" is always 
deficient also in the fundamental quality of power-to- 
observe. The literacy that does nothing, that leads to no 
results, that does not eventuate in acts, that is unob- 
servant, inefficient, and unpractical, is in the opinion of 
the working world contemptible, for it is usually too indo- 
lent even to express itself beyond the passive manifest- 
ation of indolence in the character. 

^ " The true end of knowing is doing." Balliet, Address, Mass. Teach- 
ers' Asso., quoted by O'Shea, Dynamic Factors in Educatio7i^ p. 61. 



230 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Mere literacy must be discriminated from that strange 
dualism occasionally manifested, when the knowledge gained 
by reading and perhaps even by conversation remains remote 
from action, and its relation to expression is never observed 
or at least never obeyed. 

A man may " make his living " as a persistently traditional, 
narrow-visioned farmer, practicing neither rotation of crops 
nor intensive agriculture, never improving the breed of his 
cattle or painting his buildings, scorning modern machinery 
and business methods, and scarcely suspecting the applica- 
bility to his own affairs of the very knowledge that he has 
been acquiring in books and magazines read in hours 
when he should have been at work upon the farm. He is 
satisfied when the crops have paid his taxes, pew rent, and 
clothing bills and left him leisure to be literary. The discus- 
sion of politics is a matter of literacy ; and this discussion 
has cost many a farmer the competence that the efficient 
secure for old age. 

The perfect man would be as good as he is efficient, 
and as efficient as he is intelligent ; and his intelligence 
would be adequate to the problem of his environment. 
His knowledge has been perfected by use ; and the use 
has been governed by a kind heart. But, as we shall see 
later, this " kindness of heart " is no mere matter of 
whim or of occasion, but a wholeness of wisdom actuated 
by love for one's neighbors and limited by a just self- 
respect. 

The beginning of this process of complete education 
must be upon principles capable of bringing the scholar 
to this goal of perfectness. Until we realize fully and 
clearly that, since we are all finite (and therefore certain 
in this earthly life to be imperfect even in old age after 
all our opportunities), our morality must always be less 
than our efficiency and our efficiency less than our intel- 
ligence, and that our intelligence is established upon our 
observation of reality and conditioned by our literacy; we 
shall not be able to see the true method of education. 




INTELLIGENCE 231 

Pyramids of different heights may be erected upon a given 
base. Pyramids of various slopes may be truncated at any 
height. 



Morality . , 

Efficiency 

Intelligence 



a. The intelligent man. b. The intelligent-efficient man. 

c. The intelligent-efficient-moral man. 

Not only is it true of man as a whole, an entity, an 
individual, that his morality cannot be greater than his 
efficiency, nor his efficiency greater than his intelligence, 
and that intelligence precedes and establishes the foun- 
dations of efficiency and that efficiency is the foundation 
of morality ; but it is also true of every personal habit or 
quality (the force of morality) that it is the resultant of 
acts that are themselves resultants of intelligence. We 
see or feel or think ; then act ; last become. 

Here rises the great problem of habit in education, a 
problem scarcely considered as yet by either educators or 
psychologists.^ It is more than a problem : it is an entire 

^ I gave four years in a seminar of graduate students to the psycho- 
logy of habit ; and saw in the end that all the foundation work in physi- 
ological psychology and all the structural work in psychology proper 
as related to habit must yet be done. 

The relations of habit to instinct ; motive and habit ; the physical foun- 
dations of habit (psychophysical parallelism) ; the inherited habits ; habit 
as limitation to education ; heredity and social progress ; evolution and 
habit; the establishment and the overthrow of habit; innovations, re- 
forms, revolutions ; the conflicts of the virtues (the moral habits) ; the 
historical causes and processes of the vices (the so-called immoral habits) ; 
the evaluation of habits in education, in morals, in religion, in politics, 
and in economics, and of the fashions of society ; the social milieu ; the 
relation of habit to progress, personal and social ; habit and free will ; 



232 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

mathematic, suggested here and there by a monograph 
or a chapter, but some day to be the subject of treatises 
and tomes. MoraHty is a summation or harmony of 
habits, a correlation between personal and social habits. 

Articulate speech has transformed the animal into the 
human. Recorded speech, that greatest of all human 
inventions, has made the human into the citizen. The 
literate is he to whom or by whom thought may be 
conveyed by letters. In civilization, literature (thought 
in letters) is far more important than oral language, 
aurally perceived. Literacy, therefore, becomes almost 
synonymous with intelligence or knowledge. The actual 
amount and the quality of intelligence actually secured 
without the use of letters or phonetic sounds are almost 
negligible, though this should not be so. The exceptions 
at best no more than point out the rule. The principle of 
learning by reading is so familiar as almost to be ignored, 
— like the sky and the sun, which so few notice. 

A few schools have recently adopted silent reading as a reg- 
ular daily exercise. In truth, all reading is silent. The oral 
reading is mere repetition, second edition reproduction of the 

the genius ; the mediocre ; the idiot ; the criminal ; the saint ; the hero ; 
the coward ; the man of peace and the man of war ; language ; sex ; na- 
tionality ; race ; religion ; poverty ; wealth ; culture ; character ; custom, 
law, and political freedom ; these are but a few of the thousand obvious 
topics of the psychology of habit. 

It is a surprising fact that for so many ages, in so many nations, habit 
should have been a topic upon every tongue and that habits should have 
been so closely and frequently discussed, and that the act of thinking, 
feeling, willing should have formed the topic of a great new science, while 
habit, the second power of the act, should have been so uniformly sub- 
ordinate, if noted at all. Cf. Morgan, Habit and Instinct ; Radestock, 
Habit in Education ; Kulpe, Outlines of Psychology, pp. 41 ff. ; Baldwin, 
Social and Ethical Interpretatiojis ; vol. ii of Mental Development, pp. 35 f . ; 
Bagley, The Educative Process, chapter vii ; O'Shea, Education as Ad- 
justment ; Patten, Heredity and Social Progress ; Andrews, "Habit," 
American Journal of Psychology, 1903, pp. 121-149; James, Principles of 
Psychology, vol. i, pp. 104-127 ; Johnson, " Practice and Habit," Studies^ 
Yale Psychological Laboratory, vi, 1898, pp. 51-103. 



INTELLIGENCE 233 

real reading, which is a secret, personal, voiceless intellection. 
The familiar school reading aloud is elocution. The series of 
reading processes that bring the mind forward to a generous 
literacy seems to advance as follows : recognition of the lit- 
eral sign as associated with a sound and recollection (or 
interpretation) of the sound as meaning something ; by sup- 
pression of consciousness of the sound, immediate recognition 
of the sign as meaning something ; relating the meanings of 
the signs in association ; by suppression of the consciousness 
of the signs, recollecting or interpreting the relations im- 
mediately as some mode or form of thought; associating 
intelligently the recollections and interpretations present in 
consciousness ; and, finally, critically thinking over or beyond 
these associations of memory and of reason and becoming 
thereby free in thought. Such is literacy. 

A universal language, employing uniform, certain, and de- 
finite phonic signs, one only for each sound, and one sound 
only for each sign, and permitting no homonyms, is a literary 
desideratum, apparently far, far off, perhaps never to be real- 
ized.^ This consideration introduces two of the four great 
questions of language, phonics and polyglottism, — the others 
being grammar and definition. We hear and think so much 
of spelling that we often fail to remember that in the Semitic, 
Greek, Latin, Teutonic, and Slavic languages the foundations 
are phonetic. Spelling, indeed, belongs rather to the field of 
efficiency than of literacy, for all the spelling requisite for 
literacy is enough to permit recognition of the sound in the 
word. This has been evidenced by a great array of American 
humorists whose "bizness," "tuf," " Geroosalem," and "crit- 
tur " have served to convey not only the sound but the entire 
thought and a little more. In that "little more," the humor 
has often consisted. 

The literate must learn some sounds that name things, 
qualities, and acts, and others that suggest relations. 

1 Such a universal language is not to be confused with an international 
language, which is possible and practicable, if not probable. The pro- 
spects of Esperanto now look bright ; but neither Esperanto nor Volapiik 
nor Idiom Neutral is a truly phonetic speech. 



234 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Because we remember our primers, this seems much sim- 
pler than it is. 

*' The big cat is old and white " seems very easy to the lit- 
erate adult mind. But consider it. The correct pronunciation 
of " the " before a consonant is a matter of rule and of prac- 
tice. The word itself is technical and unnecessary, though 
perhaps advantageous. Greece had its several articles, Rome 
none. " Big " recalls space and relation, both of which ideas 
are quite vague to children. " Cat " is easy, — a mere name 
of an object, — and yet to read well one must recall the type, 
if not the particular object, the concept, if not the percept. 
" Is " also involves relation, expressing here a synthetic- 
analytic judgment, synthetic as to the union of cat and of age 
and whiteness, analytic as to the isolation of great age from 
time and of whiteness from general color. Oldness and white- 
ness are terms involving interpretation of experience. " And " 
is a term of relation by union. 

A more difficult sentence reveals at once the essential 
language difficulty. " While the practical application of mere 
ideology brings the State into the acute crisis of political fever, 
mere empiricism produces chronic maladies, making the bright 
sword of justice rust, enfeebling the health of government, and 
weakening the moral vigor of society." ^ Here we have words 
whose phonic elements are difficult to discover and to articu- 
late conventionally, — "practical," "ideology," "crisis," 
" empiricism," " chronic,'* " sword," " government," " society." 
" While " expresses a relation very difficult to comprehend. 
" State " is a name, it is true ; and yet it is a name of singu- 
lar difficulty to define or even to understand. " Empiricism," 
" justice," " moral ; " these are words more familiar than " ide- 
ology," yet far more complex and troublesome. To read this 
sentence, one needs a long schooling and a large experience 
in life. I question whether there is in America a single youth 
under eighteen years of age who at sight can read the sen- 
tence and define every term. Not one in ten of our annual 
college graduates could read it intelligently upon Commence- 

^ Bluntschli, Theory of the State (Oxford translation), p. 6. 



INTELLIGENCE 235 

ment Day. The sentence expresses admirably the antithesis 
between revolution and bureaucracy, political theory and 
political practice, ideal government and government as it 
generally and really is. In truth, it requires " learning " and a 
political experience to understand the thought. The essential 
language-difficulty is at once revealed as being the discovery of 
the thought contained in the words colligated in sentences. To 
read is to find in the signs of language their thought-content. 

The second question is the profitableness of polyglot- 
tism. Why should one who has learned or is learning 
one language endeavor to acquire another ? We often 
talk of the desirability of one universal language. Is 
not, then, the acquisition of a second language entirely 
a utilitarian consideration ? Two valid reasons may be 
given for knowing well at least two languages. He who 
knows but one imperfect language with greatest difficulty 
knows even that or himself as a thinker in that lan- 
guage.^ He cannot know its philological history, the 
ancient connotations of its roots and suffixes and pre- 
fixes, the causes and tendencies of its grammar. He can- 
not rethink his thoughts in a strange form of words and 
by the contrast discover himself, his personality, in them. 
The reason why the whole value of self-alienation by 
the study of a foreign language is not familiar to every 
one, though it is familiar to some, is because so few ever 
really and completely acquire a second language. ^ 

The second valid reason for the genuine acquisition of 
a second language is the definition of thought. The 
micrometer of the vernier upon the theodolite of the 
surveyor measures with minute accuracy by its method 
of comparing the same space divided into tenths and 
again into ninths, the difference being a hundredth. It 
locates with extreme precision the true zero, the central 

' " A man who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his 
own." Goethe, Sayittgs in Prose. 

2 Trench, The Study of Words ; Hamerton, The Intellectual Life. 



236 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

or focal point. So with words. One who can compare 
intelHgently speech with its Latin synonym liiigua, or 
beautiful with its Greek synonym KaXd?, or time-spirit 
with its German equivalent Zeit-Geist, or good evening 
with its Italian equivalent buo7ia sera, or God with the 
Jahveh of the Hebrews, can enter upon the ideas in- 
volved and expressed, and he can compare their limits. 
Every word has its shades of meaning, its nuances. 
When synonymous words of different languages are com- 
pared, these shades of meaning become as clear as the 
corona of the sun in a total eclipse by the moon. 

One word, as it were, eclipses the other, revealing by ap- 
proach and collision its greater content or its finer beauty. In 
English, cordiality and hospitality are measurably synony- 
mous ; the difference is the real or practical kindness of the 
latter. Upon the vernier of thought, hospitality centres upon 
cordiality but overlaps it by practical expression. A cordial 
man may not 'be sufficiently generous to be hospitable, to take 
his friend into his home as a guest. But to be hospitable without 
being cordial is unthinkable. Yet he who has not learned Latin 
can only with great difficulty perceive this difference, which 
lies in cars, heart, and hospes, home-guest. Or let us compare 
vian and vir ; skill and ars ; good and dya^o?. From each 
comparison, our ideas acquire sharper and fuller definition. 
The Greek Christ and the Aramaic Jesus are synonymous 
words that tell the meaning of a schism in Christendom six- 
teen hundred years old, — an apparently irreconcilable differ- 
ence. Can Jesus save by his example ? Has Christ saved by 
his death ? Was the crucifixion a political blunder ? Or was 
it a divinely appointed Atonement ? 

The two valid reasons for the study of a second lan- 
guage are definition of words and definition of ideas. 
Were not English itself a language colligated and de- 
rived from several other languages, were it not a compo- 
sition of foreign and ancient languages, these two reasons 
would be for us even stronger than they are. The advan- 



INTELLIGENCE 237 

tages to a Japanese, a Chinese, a Hindoo, of the study 
of any European tongue are incalculably great. 

The third great language question is grammar. To be 
literate, one must know the logic of speech. Of course, 
grammar turns upon the sentence, which is a synthetic 
judgment of ideas, a thought. The sentence may be a 
simple thought ; simple thoughts combined in series, but 
too closely related for separation and isolation ; or simple 
thoughts, colligated as superior or inferior. The func- 
tion of grammar is to reveal the relations of the simple 
thoughts and to analyze the synthesis of ideas, composing 
each simple or pure thought. 

A sentence is a speech. 

Sentence is a Latin derivative, implying perception or 
feeling via the senses, that is, a sentence expresses a judgment 
upon ideas or percepts or sensations perceived. A sentence 
of the first power of thought is an apperception expressed 
in words. 

Speech is a Teutonic derivative and has a curious shade of 
meaning, which is thunder or lightning. To speak is to talk 
like thunder-and-lightning, to roar, to fire away. Colloquial 
slang preserves this in a singular manner. 

Sentence implies impression and reflection, — that all know- 
ledge is from the senses : speech announces expression, 
emphasizing the individuality of man. 

After each completed thought, speech pauses, and 
there is a period of rest at the end of the sentence. 

Therefore, we capitalize the first word of each sen- 
tence (or complete speech) and block the last word with 
a dot or period. In this way, we punctuate or point out 
each rounded thought or completed series of closely re- 
lated thoughts. All the internal punctuation of the sen- 
tence depends upon the same principle, which is, that 
the associations of thoughts in clauses and of ideas in 
phrases are marked by brief pauses and may, therefore, 
be appropriately indicated or pointed off by subordinate 



238 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

marks. Punctuation does, indeed, exaggerate the pauses 
of thought ; but it exaggerates in the interest not of the 
thinker, but of the follower of the thought. The reader, 
not the writer, compels the punctuating of ideas (words), 
of composed ideas (phrases), of simple thoughts (clauses), 
and of the entire sentence or speech. 

At first thought, it may appear that the thinker who 
writes is more heavily handicapped by his readers than the 
thinker who speaks is handicapped by his auditors. But the 
contrary is true, for several reasons. The auditor must go 
forward pari passu with the speaker, whether or not he has 
the will and the power to follow. If he loses a link, the chain 
of the logic is broken. The reader can proceed at his own 
pace. The speaker must consider his own strength and en- 
durance and his own fatigue-limits (or time-limit) and also 
those of the auditors. Emphasis by the voice has its limits ; 
but emphasis by order of words, by iteration, by exposition 
has almost no limits. Visual learning is much younger in the 
race than auditory ; ^ but visually we may compass a page at 
once, while aurally we may hear but a syllable at a time and 
retain scarcely ten words in one presentation in conscious- 
ness. But for the magic of the personal presence and agree- 
able voice of a few orators, written language, centuries ago, 
would have displaced spoken language save in brief conver- 
sation. 

We call words, because of their uses, " parts of speech," 
meaning parts of the sentence, indispensable fractions of the 
integral unit, the sentence or complete judgment. The longer 
the sentence the less important any word, that is, any func- 
tional part. In itself, no word is a noun or a preposition or 
an adverb, but may be this or that by its use in the sentence, 
its part in the speech. We recognize the truth of this when 
we consider words that are capable of several uses. " He did 
well." "He is well." "The well was dug." "Well, I disagree." 
Of course, in these various uses, " well " is a different part of 
speech ; though literally the same, it conveys a different idea 
because of its varying use. " To be or not to be, that is the 
^ Hall, Adolescence: its Psychology, zYi'ac^i&xxyi. 



INTELLIGENCE 239 

question." " Two men were there." " It is a long journey to 
fame." "Too great familiarity marks the insensitive man." 
Orally and aurally, these "to's" are the same. For con- 
venience, we distinguish them somewhat for visual differen- 
tiation. Yet the " to " of " to be " is a very different part of 
speech from the " to " of " to fame," quite as different as is 
the " too " of " too great." 

Of what values in the acquirement of literacy are the 
analysis of the simple, the compound, and the complex 
sentence ; the recognition of parts of speech ; and the 
determination of the rest of the grammar of the sen- 
tence ? The answers appear when we recall once more 
what literacy is, — the power to interpret thought, to 
dig out all the meaning that the thinker was able to put 
into his sentences. 

As the gardener collects his fruits and vegetables and packs 
them into boxes and crates, so the thinker collects his ideas 
and feelings and packs them into words and sentences. 
Grammar unpacks the thoughts and sets them upon the table 
for consumption. Grammar does even more ; it selects the 
good ideas and the real thoughts and prepares them for the 
mind. Grammar rejects misshapen and deformed thoughts. 
To talk or to write " bad grammar " is evidence of imperfect 
or incorrect thinking. 

The last language-question of importance is definition. 
The literate must learn phonics ; the vocabulary of his 
own language, if possible, with or, if fate so wills, with- 
out the help of a foreign language ; grammar ; and the 
exact meaning, the definition, of a number of words 
adequate to his thought-capacity. Each is a higher stage 
than the preceding ; each a more difficult process. It 
is comparatively easy to learn to recognize words and 
to associate their sounds and signs with ideas. It is a 
little harder to accumulate a considerable number of 
words in the memory for rapid recognition. Few persons 
know more than five thousand different words. It is 



240 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

considerably harder to get out of words in sentences 
not only the ideas in the words, but the relations of 
the words and the thoughts in each sentence. But it 
is hardest of all to define accurately the words and the 
sentences ; that is, to see clearly all, and no more than, 
the ideas and the thought. 

Because of this failure to define, human testimony upon 
"hearsay" is absolutely rejected in all English and American 
courts of law. It is not that the memory only fails ; the 
understanding, the interpretation, the definition also fails.^ 
Many managers of great business enterprises, many school 
superintendents with thousands and tens of thousands with 
whom to deal, always reduce to writing every important order, 
direction, or explanation. Why ? Because, as discussed in the 
text, visual learning far exceeds in accuracy and thoroughness 
(if not in immediate distinctness) auditory learning.^ 

Definition is the essence of logic. Without it, the 
most accurate syllogism becomes more or less fallacious. 
We may represent the process of thought as follows : — 
Ideas Words Definitions Collecting ideas 

Relations Words and „ g 

Associations phrases | g 

Thoughts Sentences Syllogisms Judgments 

Organizing sciences logically = PHILOSOPHY 

The bearings of these considerations regarding literacy 
upon educational theory and practice may be expressed 
briefly and categorically without exposing the argument 
to attack as dogmatic. Since literacy is the power to pro- 
nounce words, to associate with them the proper mean- 
ings, to define accurately their contents, and to interpret 
them in their sentence-relations (that is, as thoughts syn- 
thesizing and relating ideas), the process of becoming 
literate is obvious. It is necessitated by the nature and 
conditions of literacy. 

1 Greenleaf, On Evidence ; Reynolds, ditlo. 

2 Vide the business magazine, System, issues of 1905 and \()o6, passim. 



INTELLIGENCE 241 

1. Phonics must be perfectly acquired and frequently re- 
viewed until their recognition becomes that "acquired habit" 
which Wellington pronounced " twice nature." This means 
phonics upon every occasion when new words are introduced, 
in short, from kindergarten through the university and the 
professional school. 

2. A great abundance of reading is essential because the 
learner must see each important word in many lights and 
from many angles. But this reading must be carefully ex- 
plained, that the ideas and thoughts be clear and organized. 
Confusion of words is almost as bad as ignorance of them. 

3. Since the price of literacy is much reading with interest, 
it is essential that the reading be interesting, that it feed the 
curiosity, supply the needs as they arise, and arouse yet new 
demands. 

4. A foreign language should be studied early. And if not 
a foreign language, then the philology of the English language 
must be thoroughly mastered, beginning in early grades. The 
literate can distinguish between synonyms. 

5. Grammar is a necessity. Its true beginning is sentence- 
recognition and its next stage sentence-analysis. Grammar 
grows with one's own growth. It is a mental exercise, a 
logic, and as applied to English and to foreign languages may 
well occupy a dozen years of schooling. 

6. Definition rises to the dignity of a regular place in the 
programme. "Words are things," as Byron said. They are 
reservoirs of power. They are tools, some of tremendous 
force, others of marvelous delicacy. They are as human as 
the flesh and bones of humanity. In every subject, diffi- 
cult old words and all new words should be defined with 
unfailing faithfulness, with faith, indeed, that to know words 
is to enter into the literary inheritance, the thought, of the 
race. 

To read is to summon before the mind out of the words 
pictures as real as life, and to relate these pictures as 
closely, as definitely, as logically as did the writer him- 
self. It is to think his thoughts after him and, it may 
be, to see more in his thought than the writer himself 



242 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

ever saw. For we see in the light of our own experi- 
ences, which may be many and varied ; but we see only 
as clearly as our mind-sight has been trained to see. It 
is, therefore, useless to begin reading before we can ob- 
serve and have observed truly ; and useless to continue 
to read unless we continue to observe and to experience, 
constantly interpreting what we read by what we know 
and constantly translating what we know from experi- 
ence into what we read in the records. Thus literacy 
illuminates the fields of our observation, and observation 
illuminates the fields of our reading. And observation 
and literacy by developing the intelligence prepare the 
soul for training to efficiency. 



CHAPTER XII 

EFFICIENCY 

My father worketh hitherto, and I work. — Jesus, John, Gospel v, 17. 

Better ignorance than knowledge that does not develop a motor side. — Hall, Ado- 
lescence: its Psychology, vol. i, p. 204. 

What hand and brain went ever paired ? 
What heart alike conceived and dared ? 
What act proved all its thought had been ? 
What will but felt the fleshly screen ? 

R. Browning, l^he Last Ride Together. 

Who does not admire the efficient man.'' The Oriental. 
He rules all the world save the empire of that efficient 
woman, Tsi An. But he is secretly despised from Cairo 
east to Canton. To the Occidental mind, efficiency far 
exceeds literacy: to the Oriental, efficiency seems ignoble, 
needless, wanton. Therefore, the Occident surpasses the 
Orient, marking a higher tide in human life. Therefore, 
the awakening Orient throws off its literary lethargy and 
once more seeks to do. For the Orient was not always 
asleep in philosophic revery, in traditional routinism, 
content with keeping life in the body. It gave birth to 
Genghis Khan and to Mohammed. The Orient has been 
fallow ground for a thousand years. Who knows what 
crops may not yet spring from that fertile soil } ^ 

Mere doing is not efficiency. The doing must be in- 
telligent, purposeful doing of things worth while. There- 
fore, in a high civilization, the greatest efficiency is the 
accomplishment of a generous intelligence, yet such 
intelligence is in itself not enough ; it is merely the 
condition of efficiency. When doing passes beyond 

^ Cf, Little, Intimate China ; Smith, Village Characteristics ; Vambery, 
Western Culture in Eastern Lands. 



244 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

knowledge (which in civiUzation is almost synonymous 
with literacy), it is at once in danger of being incom- 
petent, valueless, even dangerous. The world resounds 
with waste effort, misdirected exertion, work without 
wages, capital lost in *'bad" investments, unhappy re- 
actions from ''bad" acts. He who does too much is the 
advertiser of his own folly. The "too much" of action 
is evidence of too little knowledge. 

As the literate man is tempted to be that and no more, 
and as his peril is reflection without fruition in useful 
activity, so the efficient man is tempted to be not that 
but a mere doer, because his peril is action without re- 
flection upon the data of knowledge. Those women of the 
Western world who have achieved literacy are scarcely 
yet in danger of too great and of too many opportunities 
of action, but the men of this Western world who have 
achieved economic and political freedom are in very great 
and almost constant danger of activity beyond knowledge. 

Nothing is more common in the United States, North, 
South, East, and West, than to find men in the high places 
of government, of religion, of business, of education, of cul- 
ture, of war, — heads of families also, — who have no com- 
prehension of their tasks, powers, opportunities, obligations.^ 
They do daily many things, and they do a dangerous propor- 
tion of them wrong. The capitalist " turns down " a wise 
proposition and undertakes a foolish one. Sooner or later 
most properties are wasted utterly or pass into the hands of 
the competent. The tool, the grafter, the ignoramus sits in 
what should be the seat of the statesman, the wise lawgiver. 
Government becomes a department of business, and a badly 
managed department at that. Universities select ministers 
instead of educators, or flatterers of possible rich patrons in- 
stead of scholars, as their presidents ; and cities select clerks 
instead of executive teachers as superintendents. Why ? Be- 
cause trustees and members of public governing boards act 
without intelligent knowledge. The relative incompetence of 
1 Miinsterberg, The Americans, p. 8. 



EFFICIENCY 245 

our national government in both peace and war is too familiar 
to need exposition here. Democracy is marvelously efficient 
upon the periphery of the individual initiative of the citizens, 
but ominously deficient at the governmental centres. In 
America we do enough ; but we do not do well enough. We 
have not learned that it is immoral to undertake what one 
has not the preparation and ability to perform. 

Our specific inquiry here is hov^ to achieve efficiency. 
It has frequently been said that health is a condition 
limiting efficiency. It has even been said that physical 
strength is such a condition. The truth will appear upon 
definition of the terms and upon summary of the facts. 
Health is haleness, holiness, wholeness. It implies per- 
fection of the body as a working organism. This includes, 
of course, perfectness of the body as tool or comrade 
or producer of the mind. Human health i^ scarcely an 
end, but rather a means to complete living. Paradoxical 
though it may seem, health is rather the result of satis- 
faction with life than the cause pi it. The mind con- 
ditions the body rather than the body the mind.^ 

What but mind fashions the embryo in the womb and 
gives the newborn infant structure, tissue, organs, func- 
tioning ? What but mind gives sight to the eye, hearing 
to the ear, feeling to the flesh, taste, desire, pain, joy ? 
Moreover, who cares to live when he cannot enjoy life, 
that is, when his mind is not in control of his body.? 
Not he who knows that he can never recover control. 

In the years 1905 and 1906, the presidents of the three 
largest life insurance companies of America were discredited 
by public revelations developed in an investigation by a com- 
mittee of the New York State Legislature. These three men, 
though above sixty, were in robust health. Within a few 
months, one had died of " a complication of diseases," another 
was a mental wreck in a sanatorium, and the third a pitiful 
invalid traveling abroad for his health. 

^ Per contra, Clouston, The Hygiene of Mind. 



246 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Sickness and even death so often follow financial troubles, 
such as bankruptcy, insolvency, losses in speculation, as to at- 
tract no other comment than " What else could you expect ? " 
One who is growing in fame or in wealth or in power is almost 
always improving in health. The increasing bodily vigor of 
men in the Presidency, the Governorships, the Mayoralties, is 
proverbial. Prosperity is a condition and almost an assurance 
of health. 1 

Poverty breeds disease not only because it causes over- 
work and underfeeding and because in confined quarters, 
foul air, noise, the body lacks sunlight, general exercise, and 
sleep, but also because it " takes the heart out of life." Suc- 
cessful men often work sixteen, even eighteen hours a day, 
neglect to eat regularly and properly, live in their offices or 
on the railroad, or about hotels, breaking nearly every *' law 
of health," drinking too much alcoholic fluid and smoking 
too much tobacco ; but all the while they remain vigorous 
and well.^ 

There is a current notion that to be healthy one must 
exercise the external muscles, working off waste tissue, 
getting fresh air, and creating an appetite. Over-exercise 
is easy and common. At a given time, the body has so 
much energy, and no more. To maintain itself, the body 
requires a certain minimum, varying of course with the 
external temperature, wind, and sun, and with the cloth- 
ing. Any exercise whatever beyond internal processes, 
and such accessory muscular movements as encourage 
such processes, must come from a surplus above that 
minimum. Death is the result of persistence in over- 
exercise, — that is, of persistent fatigue. 

Physicians sometimes fail to understand this principle. Ex- 
pert neurologists, however, attending sane or insane neuras- 

1 James asserts that responsibility and power are " dynamogenic " in 
their physiological effects. Address, American Psychological Association, 
1906. 

2 Curtis, Nature and Health, chapter xii. 



EFFICIENCY 247 

thenics prostrated by complete exhaustion, allow their patients 
to lie, it may be for weeks at a time, without motion, appar- 
ently without breathing, in darkened rooms, as quiet as the 
tomb, waiting to see whether life, flickering upon surplus or 
reserve vitality, shall yet return to a flame. ^ Deaths by relapse 
in convalescence after disease has run its course are very 
common, and occur almost always for want of understanding 
the simple principle that the first energy developed by the 
human body is required for its own internal operations. Only 
the surplus can be devoted to " work." 

The relation of health to efficiency is that a sense of 
efficiency conduces to health, and that health in turn 
supplies the surplus energy required by the effective 
effort. The beginning of health with man is in his 
mind, not in his body.^ 

The inefficient man is unhealthy ; because he is in- 
efficient, he is unhealthy. One of the major symptoms 
of inefficiency is inability to control the body ; and in 
civilization it is absolutely necessary to control the body. 
The first essential in acquiring efficiency is mastery of 
the body : the second is mastery for some end. As one " 
must "break" the colt before one drives him to market, 
so one must reduce the body to subjection before setting 
out to some particular accomplishment. This is what 
the inefficient never learn, or learn so imperfectly that 
their efforts, if made at all, break down in process. The 
world calls all the inefficient " weak-willed ; " but often 
they are in the strictest sense strong-willed. Their will 
is not rationalized; it is sporadic, whimsical, capricious, 
physical, energetic, self-centred in its object but dissi- 
pated in its efforts, and therefore ineffective for ends and 
unfamiliar with means. 

^ Mitchell, Nerve Paralysis, Neurasthenia, Doctor and Patient, and 
other titles. 

2 The case of Elizabeth Barrett, who married Robert Browning, is in 
point. 



248 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

The relation of mind to body determines this matter of 
physical health. In animals, it is only upon occasion that 
the body is controlled by the mind as a continuum, an 
identity, the simulacrum of personality ; but in men, such 
control characterizes all the superior and, indeed, all but 
the distinctly inferior.^ The human mind begins to ac- 
quire control in early infancy. The baby uses hands, 
feet, eyesight, hearing as tools and viaducts beyond the 
power of even mature and trained dogs, horses, and ele- 
phants, the most intelligent animals. A normal child of 
four has entire control of the periodicity and disposition 
of bodily refuse ; can restrain laughter and, to an extent, 
tears ; can curb anger and fear and simulate affection 
and delight ; habitually walks upright ; articulates speech ; 
has regulated its appetite to thres or four meals a day 
at fixed times ; can listen to continuous narrative ; to a 
degree, can summon recollection ; and has acquired and 
can manifest a measure of social deportment. At fifteen 
years of age, the boy or girl is well ''schooled." The 
body has become the victim of cultures that the mind 
may be victor in civilization. Biologically, the human 
condition at fifteen years of age is anomalous. The phys- 
ical life has discontinued not a few of the customs of 
the biological continuum since protoplasm began. The 
marvel is not that so many boys and girls are ill, but that 
so many are well. But the marvel disappears when we 
consider that this whole discipline of the body by the 
mind, when conducted intelligently amid conditions and 
by means scientifically correct, is good for the health. ^ 
The marvel becomes, therefore, a reproach. At eighteen 

^ That it characterizes the inferior even more than the superior, is the 
opinion of not a few psychologists. Cf. Gowen, " Pestilences and Other 
Epidemics," American Jmirnal of Psychology, January, 1907. 

2 Regulated and regular exercise of the mind is as good, physiolo- 
gically, for the body as it is for the brain, since it floods the controlling 
nerve tissue of the entire body with blood and energy. Clouston, Hygiene 
of Mind. 



EFFICIENCY 249 

years of age, more or less, two classes of persons begin 
to regard health as of primary importance, those who have 
wrecked their bodies by the establishment of mental con- 
trol and those who see in bodily health an end in itself, 
the highest mode of happiness. The first are the invalids, 
and the second the athletes. 

This discussion omits from consideration those who have 
inherited ill-health from birth and those who, at the age of 
puberty, are inheriting it by atavism or by cross-heredity. The 
former, by definition, have never really known what health is, 
for the congenital invalid has never experienced €v</>opta, well- 
bearing, joy in life, a sense of carrying life out gloriously. 
There are a few amazingly, extraordinarily " well " (vigorous) 
persons who seem almost to manifest the symptoms of a 
physical insanity, a paresis. " They carry all before them." 
They are not so much " magnetic " as overpowering. If tra- 
dition is correct, Charlemagne was such a person ; William 
the Conqueror ; Alexander the Great. Such men are occa- 
sionally successful in business far beyond their intellectual 
and moral deserts ; because business is the modern form of 
private war.^ (Not exactly, however, in the same sense as 
diplomacy is a modern form of public war.) Probably more 
persons are born capable of such exceeding health than are 
permitted by modern civilization to attain it.^ The systematic 
school-o-oing of the commercial middle-classes prevents this 
superb physical development, which appears most frequently 
among the well-reared rich and the industrious farmers and 
mechanics. 

Certain significant features of the modern life of chil- 
dren appear to me notable and reprehensible, for the suf- 
ficient reason that they tend to prevent or delay normal 

1 They are the examples cited by the proponents of the new science 
and art of energetics, which seem to some nobler than ethics. Cf . Gulick, 
The Efficient Life ; Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life. 

2 I have met among the Negros and Mestizos a proportion of such per- 
sons far beyond that among the Caucasians, who in comparison with 
them seem physically victimized by centuries of civilization. 



250 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

efficiency.^ My postulates are that intelligence, effi- 
ciency, and morality need not be excessively disparate ; 
that they may be developed in a zigzag of process or in 
a concatenation of stages ; and that with most persons a 
generous intelligence is unattainable in the absence of 
some efficiency. 

Merely for the sake of system, I note these features 
in the familiar order of their relations to the social in- 
stitutions, — Property, Family, Church, State, Culture, 
Education, Occupation, Business, War.^ Despite the im- 
portance of Property in this American civilization (where, 
indeed, it is less important than in England or in France), 
persons under twenty-one years of age have almost 
nothing to do with it. They are practically never the 
executive owners of wealth. The American legal theory 
is that the person under twenty-one is an infant, not able 
to walk amid vital matters, not able to talk about wealth 
and property. The purpose of this theory is to prevent 
the swindling of ignorant, weak-willed persons by scoun- 
drels. The effect of it is to keep boys and girls ignorant 
and weak of will in relation to property. As curiosity is 
the motive of both observation and literacy, so ambition 
is the motive of efficiency ; and ambition soon recognizes 
the relation of property to personal success. The pro- 
tection of infants from swindlers never has been effec- 
tive : the frauds of trustees are as notorious as are the 
follies of heirs just come of age. As for the trust-estates, 

1 The present abnormal conditions seem obstructive to the progress of 
mankind and characteristic of a necessary but transitional and temporary 
economic regime. 

2 The formalism of this system would seem more vital to Americans, 
were all of us to visit Central and Western Europe. In March, 1906, the 
German Kaiser denounced the opponents of the "great fundamental 
social institutions, the monarchy, property, and the army." For us, the 
monarchy is a figment of the imagination and the army a minor school. 
This seemed to be the issue between Miinsterberg and his critics at the 
Peace Congress, New York, April, 1907. 



EFFICIENCY 251 

those half-feudal creations of the modern economic re- 
gime, their sole result is to keep the heirs of wealth 
children throughout hfe, the pathetic victims of paternal 
pride and solicitude. 

Poor or rich, the child should acquire and hold pro- 
perty. It is the price of self-respect, the condition of self- 
enlargement. As one who holds a cane in his hand has 
enlarged his physical periphery by his new ability to feel 
at a distance (the hand enlarges the life beyond the 
brain), so one who owns books, tools, furniture, a cow, 
a colt, a city lot, a savings-bank deposit, a share in a rail- 
road company, has enlarged his mental horizon and has 
a sense of security, of "home " in the world. Moreover, 
his ambition to be something by getting something leads 
him to do something ; and this doing for an end con- 
duces to efficiency. Ten years of age is the character- 
istic period for the manifestation of the sense of meiim 
and of tiium. Let the child acquire property in the light 
of his accumulating knowledge, permanently worth while 
property as well as temporary toys. Many things the 
children read about they can never own ; but some of 
them their schools should own and use for them ; and 
some few the children could and would own, were our 
social notions more sane. 

The victim of a trust estate gave as his reason for marrying 
early : " Well, I knew that I could never own any property 
myself. My father saw to that. But at least I own a wife ; 
she 's mine, and she does n't belong to the trustee." This 
same wife has taught, perhaps forced is not too strong a 
term, the man to save one half his annual income, so that he 
has acquired unreasonably late in life a notion of property. 

The poor suffer too much from family communism. A 
little girl, who had been given two pennies, justified her ex- 
penditure of them for candy by saying: "If I had took 
them home, Pop would have taken them from me to buy 
tobacco or Maw to help get the Baby some shoes." 



252 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Much worse in modern life is our inability properly to 
utilize in the home the labor of our children. This is a 
great pity, and our schools should supplement the radical 
defect. Getting up, dressing, eating, going to school, 
acquiring literacy, playing, and going to bed do not 
constitute for children a normal or a rational life. They 
are deprived of the human right to do and to make use- 
ful things. In the modern home, of poverty, of compe- 
tence, and of wealth, there is nothing worth while for the 
child to do. The kindergarten with its occupations and 
its busy work for the four-year-old comes into the life 
of the modern child as a great relief ; but it lasts at most 
only a year or two. The art and manual training of the 
grades when immediately connected with the kinder- 
garten tasks help in a measure, especially when objects 
of value are made. But at the best they do not help 
much. 

Said a three-year-old child to its father, " I Ve nothing to 
do." She harped on this for days, cried herself to sleep with 
the monotonous refrain, night after night. She had sickened 
of the inept nursery toys, the aimless paper-cutting, the 
watching of her sisters after school at their employments and 
the watching for their home-coming from school. Finally, her 
mother invented something worth while for her to do, and 
kept on inventing until the day for going to kindergarten at 
last arrived. The modern mother either buys her bread at 
the baker's or hires a servant to make it, — and the servant 
is too busy to allow children around. A house with two or 
three servants is a tomb for children. The boys and even the 
girls of well-to-do parents who keep horses in stables upon 
their own property are usually to be found there (for stables 
are favorite haunts for children because there is always some- 
thing to do where there are animals) ; but city parents, for 
obvious ethical and social reasons, must order coachman or 
stableman to keep their children out of the stables and barns. 
Even country parents of means try to shut up their children 
into lives of "nothing to do." 



EFFICIENCY 253 

The normal animal becomes partly self-supporting 
when very young. The human young are deprived of 
this means of growth and of enjoyment and of acquiring 
insight into life. 

This is one of the significant features that gave meaning 
to the experimental elementary school of the Chicago School 
of Education under Dr. John Dewey, But it is not enough to 
have industrial education at school. Industrial activity at 
home is yet more important.^ 

The rapid disintegration of the home as a social force 
is due primarily to its loss of economic activities, and 
secondarily to its resultant inability to secure and to re- 
tain the affection of the children. In the days when 
children as well as adults worked to help keep the family 
alive, home meant something. Indeed, it meant almost 
everything. To-day it means almost nothing. Hence, 
among the poor we have desertions by husbands and 
fathers of the wives, mothers, and children, and among 
the rich divorces and adulteries, unknown or condoned. 
And we have also unfilial children, parents neglected in 
old age, brothers and sisters alienated and estranged. 
There may be no way, no means, in an age of machinery, 
whereby ever to restore to the home an integral and- es- 
sential character. But if there be such a way or means, 
it must be by restoring economic activities to the home, 
— to the father, to the mother, and to the children. In 
the country or the village, the home may have both out- 
door gardening and indoor industrial manufacture ; in 
the city, it can have only the latter. Whether the factory- 
system will break up when electric power can be con- 
veyed to any room, no one yet knows. If there be no 
way to restore the home, and if the race is to maintain 
its efftciency, the children must have the opportunities 
of industrial accomplishment at school. And the school 
must absorb many features now outside its customary 

* Cf. Dopp, Industrial Education. 



254 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

range and be integrated as the new, vast, portentous, 
independent, unique social institution.^ 

No man knows how much the School may yet arrogate 
to itself. Three hundred years ago no man dreamed 
that the State would arrogate to itself even a fraction of 
its present powers and influences. It is quite conceiv- 
able that the School will watch over childbirth and child- 
rearing, feed the children, house them in dormitories, 
teach them religion, educate them as now and far better 
than now, advise them in courtship, and instruct them in 
parentage and in home-making. ^ No one of these propo- 
sitions is more unreasonable, of not one is the accom- 
plishment more incredible than are the present efforts to 
teach the duties and powers of political citizenship and 
to train to skill in the affairs of business. In its schools, 
China emphasizes most the obligations to parents. 
Everything depends upon the point of view, as has been 
said ten thousand times before. 

In short, either the home must be restored for the 
sake of children and of the mothers or else the school 
must be developed.^ 

In human history, when a proposed reform is the restora- 
tion of an institution that society has outgrown, we may be 
reasonably certain that the reform would be anachronistic, 

1 In 1905, there was founded in Illinois a new educational paper, The 
School Century. The title may be prophetic. We speak of the fifteenth 
century as the Italian century, of the sixteenth as the Spanish, of the 
seventeenth as the Dutch, of the eighteenth as the French, of the nine- 
teenth as the English, and of the twentieth as the American. (Posterity 
may speak of the twenty-first as the German and of the twenty-second 
as the Russian or Japanese ; who knows ?) Similarly we speak of the 
thirteenth century as the Church century. We may speak of the nine- 
teenth as the State century and of the twentieth as the School century. 

2 As indication of the tendency in this direction, see Harris, Address, 
Department of Superintendence, Proceedings National Educational Asso- 
ciation^ Chicago, 1907. 

3 Stetson-Gilman, Woman and Economics ; Spargo, The Cry of the 
Children; Tyler, The Physical Basis of Education. 



EFFICIENCY 255 

reactionary, and destructive of progress. But is the Home 
really outgrown, outworn, passe ; and would its restoration 
be devolution ? Why not make homestead land once more 
allodial, free of all tax, inalienable by owners or heirs, non- 
transferable even as pledge upon mortgage ? Only upon such 
legal foundation can homes once more grow in the land. 

As many men and women, perhaps most, go through 
life as proletarians, propertyless, so the multitudes of the 
essentially homeless, who as apartment or room tenants 
tramp from street to street, from city to city, from State 
to State, is annually increasing. Property and Home, as 
social institutions, are almost as meaningless to them as 
Paradise and Heaven. I know these things because I 
have experienced them through bitter years and decades 
as child and man. But the case of these multitudes is 
quite as bad in respect to the Church. 

Religion used to be a dehcate and a difficult subject. It 
has lost for many its delicacy because of its remoteness ; 
and it has lost its difficulty because of its strangeness. 
Many persons either have had no religious experiences 
or have forgotten them. Such cannot understand or 
appreciate religion^ — just as he who has had no pro- 
perty cannot understand or appreciate the love of pro- 
perty and the care for it, despising the rich and the 
thrifty, but for whom all the wealth of the world would 
soon be wasted away and civilization would disappear in 
barbarous poverty. ^ 

The disintegration of the Church has, it is true, been 
accompanied by, perhaps has caused, a certain expansion 
of religion.^ How far it has proceeded, few realize until 
they have investigated the matter historically. The Ro- 
man Catholic Church is, indeed, recovering to-day by 
indirection a measure of its former power in the State, 

1 Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine. 

2 Mayo-Smith, Statistics and Economics. 

3 Donald, The Expansion of Religion. 



256 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

being a greater influence in politics than those outside of 
politics realize : but even this international Church is 
losing its grip upon men and upon children. When the 
Church lost its monastic and conventual estates and its 
political and ecclesiastical powers of taxation, it lost its 
economic functions and, therefore, declined in authority 
and prestige.^ The Catholic Church, however, does gen- 
erally hold a brief for its right to educate children. Now 
the children are the lifeblood of any religious organiza- 
tion, denomination, or sect ; and the Protestant sects at 
least in America pay but little attention to, and care 
but little for, children, I speak in the relative terms of 
history. The evidences of this are the scant time de- 
voted to children, — an hour of a Sunday, though even 
this is omitted by city churches during the summer 
vacation, 2 — and the elaborate process of " admission into 
the church." If, as I believe, the Church is an institution 
ordained by God for man, then the Church is universal, 
and every child is born into the Church when he is born 
into the world, as certainly as he is born into the State, 
as certainly as he should be understood to be born into 
the School, as certainly as he has the right to be born 
into the Home. This belief is for me the solvent of all 
the related questions of right and wrong, — of religion, 
of government, of education, of parentage and homestead 
rights, and, therefore, of atheisms and anarchies, of igno- 
rance and indolence, of adultery, tenantry, and poverty. 

^ We see, for example, at Vienna and at Washington wonderful gov- 
ernment buildings that display the political color of the modern world ; 
and we forget that at Rome and at Constantinople are wonderful religion 
buildings that display not less conclusively the ecclesiastical color of the 
mediaeval world. To-day, the State transcends the Church ; to-morrow, 
Business may transcend State and Church, and establish at London and 
at New York wonderful commerce buildings to bear testimony to this 
transcendence. Cf. Patten, Theory of Social Forces. 

2 The pastor of a metropolitan church sent out, October i, 1906, a cir- 
cular that began : " Dear Friends, — It is the season when we resume the 
work of the Lord." 



EFFICIENCY 257 

If the child is born into the Church, then from birth 
he has duties to the Church as well as rights from it. 
These duties are worship, service, contribution, loyalty, 
society ; and these rights are instruction, tasks, benefits.^ 
There are but few signs, however, that the so-called 
" leaders " of the churches have any efficiency in the pre- 
sence of the fact that the multitudes no longer go to the 
Protestant churches and but a small proportion of them 
to the Catholic church. Most Americans are as church- 
less as they are essentially homeless and propertyless. 
Most American children go too infrequently to church 
and Sunday-school to derive therefrom any instruction 
in ethical efficiency. The whole scheme of church mem- 
bership and admission thereto is in Protestant churches 
so antagonistic to the teaching of John, "Whosoever 
will, let him take the water of life freely," - that but for 
the ''exclusive club" features, most city and many 
country churches would long since have perished. In 
religion, something to do is essential to adult and to 
child. Protestantism supplies very little to do. Its ineffi- 
ciency is notorious. And the children perish. If I have 
said almost nothing of the Sunday-school, it is because 
there is very little of good or very little of anything to 
say. The faith for want of works is moribund. 

To many who know and love the Church, each new revival 
strikes upon the heart a fear like that which suffocates the 
fond watcher at the bedside of the dying. We build not cathe- 
drals, but banks ; and we fashion not creeds, but platforms. 
We are overthrowing the diseases of the body, while the soul 
shrivels, hardens, and dies. 

The Church itself is dying for want of children whose 
hearts are devoted. In its weakness, it has no power to 
draw children to itself. The vicious circle of a maelstrom 

^ Blanchard, The Twentieth Century Church in Early Christian Con- 
ditions. 

2 Revelation xxii, 17. 



258 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

of final destruction seems established ; and the spell can 
be broken only from without. The worshiping church- 
goers are an ever-decreasing minority. And rehgion pure 
and unadorned, divine worship and humanitarian ser- 
vice, grow less and less in Sunday-school and mid-week 
prayer meeting. To the noble band who guard the 
sanctuary, all honor and all gratitude. The truth en- 
dures ; and they are safe within its protection. But the 
custodian of the truth, the institution that manifests it, 
deprived of economic functions, is slowly wearing away 
from the tides and storms of the world. 

In the present conditions of the Church, the child has 
no hope of acquiring efficiency by directed doing in its 
service. What then of the State .'' 

The American democratic State is peculiarly a man's 
institution. In the Nation and in forty-one out of the 
forty-five States, women can hold no important offices 
and can exercise almost no political functions save the 
paying (or the giving-up) of taxes. They may here and 
there vote at school elections ; but taken generally, they 
are nonentities in government. It is possible for a 
woman to be monarch of the British Empire, but not 
president of the American Republic. The influence of 
women in American political life is far less than in Eng- 
lish or French political life.* The situation is this : save 
for a few equal suffragists, American women care little 
or nothing about government or politics. Even taxpay- 
ing women leave the affairs of government to men. The 
result is that the mothers have but little influence upon 
the political education of their sons, and none upon that 
of their daughters. This produces a singular condition 
in the instruction in our high schools, with their hundred 
girls for every forty boys and their five women teachers 
for every man teacher. Usually the history and the Eng- 
lish, the Latin and the German are taught by women and 

^ Barrett, Women and Democracy. 



EFFICIENCY 259 

Studied by the girls for mental discipline or emotional 
experience, while the mathematics and the sciences (if 
any) fall to the other sex. American public secondary 
education has taken on a strangely introspective charac- 
ter. Almost the last notion of the school is that know- 
led2:e should eventuate in and direct action. 

The children of a democracy have no conscious rela- 
tion to government. Is the case different in aristocracy 
and monarchy ? Most assuredly yes in the cases of some 
children ; for in the aristocratic monarchy, the princes 
are reared from infancy to be rulers in the State, and 
the nobles, lords, knights, officials, are trained from in- 
fancy to be the executive agents of the political rulers. 
Nor has the education of the princes and of the lords 
been without avail : this, rather than hereditary excel- 
lence,* accounts for the unbroken line of the descendants 
of Cedric upon the throne of England and for the long 
centuries of Hapsburg sovereigns upon the Continent of 
Europe. Considered as government purely, and not as 
ethics, the best government in the world to-day is that 
of the Kaiser, as every competent observer knows ; and 
the strength and the wisdom of that government may 
be discovered rather in the Hohenzollern dynasty than 
in the Reichstag. 

In America, there is some slight insight into the prin- 
ciple involved in the European training of princes for 
rule and of lords for high service. We talk about the pre- 
paration of every future self-governing voter-sovereign, 
the democratic servant-ruler, for citizenship. But what 
we talk, the European nobles do. The education of 
princes does not end until it is completed, or until the 
tutors agree that further efforts at education will avail 
nothing. We are content to let the education of our 
boys end whenever our boys choose or the economic 
pressure determines. But, it will be replied, Europe 

1 Per contra, Woods, Heredity in Royalty, passim. 



26o THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

completely educates only a few ; we try to educate all. 
To this, the answer is that Europe intends to educate 
every heir to thrones, to dukedoms, to baronies, in short 
every probable ruler, and bars all others out from the 
opportunities of political power. By its system of aris- 
tocracy, monarchical Europe saves from destruction by 
the masses those ideals and traditions of culture which 
the uncultured hold of little value or despise.^ 

Whatever may be the qualifications of the foregoing 
principle, whatever may be its relation to the indubitable 
fact that all power is essentially economic and material, 
and that such economic power has survived the transit 
of civilization ^ to America, the conclusions are the same, 
and they are inevitable. Every boy should be educated 
for citizenship, and his education should be continued 
until its completion, because citizen-sovereignty is cer- 
tain for him.^ 

What, then, as to the American girl ? If there is any- 
thing that is certain in human history, it is that the mater- 
nal heritage is as important to the child as the paternal. 
Every princely line in Europe has educated its women. 
As long as the American girl has no future in govern- 
ment, so long will the American mother be less well 
fitted than she should be to bear and to rear boys who 
shall be worthy of our democratic citizenship. At pre- 
sent American democracy with its enfranchised men 

^ Miinsterberg, The Americajts, chapter xxiii ; cf. Carlyle, Heroes and 
Hero-worship. 

2 Eggleston, The Transit of Civilizatio7t, passim. 

3 Except in the District of Columbia. The effect of confining citizens 
to the function of criticism can be understood only by residence in this 
unfortunate satrapy of Congress and the President. Every American has 
a right to the educational opportunities of the ballot. In this District, 
the lessons of a thousand years of social development have been brusquely 
thrust aside; and political serfdom has been boldly and probably irrevo- 
cably revived. The dry rot of empire sets in at the capital as the dry rot 
sets in at the hearts of forest timber. Perhaps, republican empire can 
endure no longer than can any other kind of empire. 



EFFICIENCY 261 

and unfranchised women is like a biped trying to walk 
with one leg sound and the other shriveled. 

The systematic private war of the feudal period and the 
systematic public war of the national period have been 
responsible for the genealogies via the male line and 
for the patronymic nomenclature. In yet older times, the 
children bore either the maternal name or no ancestral 
name at all. But, in war times, the fathers become social 
dictators by virtue of their superior fighting powers. In 
monogamic marriage, both parents could be identified, 
and both parental and filial pride dictated the dual name 
system, — one name personal, the other paternal. Re- 
cently the triple scheme — one name personal, the next 
maternal, and third paternal — has found some vogue. 
Biology knows no defense for paternal genealogies rather 
than ancestral pedigrees. 

The proposition that girls should have no preparation 
for government because as women they are not to par- 
ticipate in it, save as the political subjects of their 
fathers, husbands, and sons, exactly squares with the 
proposition that women should not participate in govern- 
ment because they have no preparation for it. And 
both propositions reek with the false notions of- our 
eccentric culture, — that the child is not equally the heir 
of the father and of the mother, of their bodies, and of 
their souls ; that it is good for the woman and for the 
race that she should be but half educated ; and that the 
minds of men are, in some mysterious way, of masculine 
descent and those of women of feminine descent, while 
these two ways are growing ever more and more diver- 
gent. 

To some, the issue here raised may seem academic. 
It has, however, the most practical bearing upon the 
question of human efficiency, and has the most intense 
meaning for human morals. In relation to all matters of 
the State, — government, politics, legislation, judicature, 



262 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

enforcement, international affairs, private property, — 
the girl who studies history, government, political science, 
or reads the daily papers, current magazines, novels of 
political life knows that however intelligent she may be- 
come, she can never be directly an actor in such affairs. 
Government is for her a blind alley. The curiosity that 
leads to intelligence must not awaken in her an ambition 
to be efficient, lest her will be broken. I shall recite no 
general argument for woman suffrage or for equal suf- 
frage. I present only this, to my notion, unanswerable 
proposition : No education can be complete that excludes 
the idea of efficiejicy in any important social institution. 
It is unanswerable because it is a matter of definition, of 
postulate, of original premise. Of course, if the purpose 
of the Creator in maintaining the world is fulfilled 
though an entire sex be inefficient in respect to the poli- 
tical order, then I fail to conceive the Creator properly, 
and the nature of human society, this book is useless, 
and my argument is wasteful of time. A notion, how- 
ever, persists that most of the competent, clear-headed, 
and large-hearted men of this civilization are in favor of 
the complete education of all, to the measure of their 
capacities.^ 

Because of this proposition that male and female chil- 
dren alike should be prepared for efficiency in govern- 
ment, the question arises as to which of two kinds of 
methods in education is the more likely to prepare them 
properly. It is argued by some and practiced by most that 
discipline in youth is the source of independence and of 
intelligent, efficient, and moral authority and obedience 
in manhood as democratic voter-ruler. It is argued by 

^ If, because woman is consecrated to the home, therefore she needs no 
knowledge of government, then, because man is devoted to bu-siness, 
why is he not relieved of the burden of government ? Masculine demo- 
cracy objects, "No," violently; but the Old World quietly puts queens 
on thrones and relegates ordinary men to economic work and nothing 
more. 



EFFICIENCY 263 

most and practiced by few that self-government in youth 
leads to self-government in manhood and in womanhood. 
Neither teacher-rule nor pupil-government has the breadth 
of vision to see the real conditions to be met. In adult 
life, the man is to progress.through many stages and is to 
sustain many relations, some superior, most subordinate, 
and perhaps none of them continuous and permanent. 
The objects of teacher-rule are two : obedience, that is, 
docile acceptance of authority, and knowledge of princi- 
ples, that is, acquaintance with adult standards of action. 
The teacher instructs and reigns, the pupil hearkens and 
does. Unless on the merits of the various possible causes 
of action the pupil chooses to obey, there is for him no 
will-training in this system of teacher-tyranny, however 
enlightened the teacher may be. Neither fear nor affec- 
tion trains the will. As a matter of fact, the pupils in 
the school governed absolutely by the teacher get most 
of this will-training through the voluntary choices ex- 
ercised in their free relations with one another at recess 
time and out of school. 

Those who argue in favor of pupil-government occupy 
different but scarcely larger ground. It is true that " like 
produces like ; " and that, therefore, the child who. sees 
in his teacher a "boss" will look for a "boss" to rule 
him in government, in religion, and in business through- 
out life. But we are apt to forget the other equally true 
result of the principle : the child who has governed 
himself and others in the light of a child's knowledge 
will be very apt to regard that knowledge as sufficient 
for the self-government of men. In real life, childish 
ignorance and independence in government are quite as 
common and as dangerous as slavish dependence. Just 
as teacher-rule fits girls to obey sullenly in monoga- 
mous marriage and to accept frivolously a male demo- 
cratic government, so pupil-government brings boys to 
an arrogant assumption of duties of which they have 



264 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

no adequate conception. Sometimes, the boy-victim of 
teacher-tyranny at school becomes by reaction the 
would-be man-tyrant in business or "boss" in politics. 
On the other hand, the pupil-governed school is a 
forcing-house of youthful politicians. 

If the School should be continued upon its present 
lines with boys and girls in compulsory attendance until 
twenty-one years of age/its graduates would be turned 
loose into the world in a very different condition from 
that which they now manifest after schooling until four- 
teen or fifteen years old, and then training (more or less) 
in domestic or factory or office life for the girls, and in 
factory or store or mine life for the boys, for seven years 
thereafter. These intervening years before coming of 
age and after school life is over are of signal importance 
in the actual preparation of young men for active and 
of young women for passive citizenship. But the School 
should not be continued upon its present lines. It 
must effect a practical reconciliation between teacher- 
despotism and pupil-democracy. 

The relations of education to efficiency in the cultural 
arts are few and simple. Mere intelligence in music or 
in painting, in architecture or in agriculture, in engineer- 
ing or in carpentry, in bricklaying or in mining, in book- 
keeping or in merchandising, in managing employees 
or in obeying employers, is but the vision of the pro- 
mised land. It is useless to others for one to have a 
scientific knowledge of music or of literature or of steel- 
making or of house-building, but no power to express 
this knowledge in appropriate action. Such knowledge 
makes critics and mere critics.^ 



1 Henderson, Education and the Larger Life, p. 368. 

2 A professional critic may be a person who has tried an art and failed 
in it, or one who has never had the courage to try, or one who has been 
denied the opportunity to try, or one who has succeeded so well that he 
dares not or cares not to try again ; a critic is never a first-rate artist. 



EFFICIENCY 265 

The arts may be considered as fine or industrial. The 
latter form a signally important division of the occupa- 
tions of mankind. Two of the fine arts, music and paint- 
ing, should be of major consideration in all education 
because of their exceeding value in the liberation and 
disciplining of the soul. Moreover, their relation to effi- 
ciency is so immediate and their appeal to the soul is 
made so early in life that they are available for training 
to do from the first days at school. But it costs money 
to secure teachers and apparatus for teaching any art. 
Consequently, the actual courses in school in music and 
in painting are mere skeletons. Music requires not only 
teachers who are both educators and musicians, but also 
musical instruments. Children should hear good music 
and learn to play good music upon piano, harp, violin, 
flute, or organ, and to sing both in chorus and solo. Simi- 
larly, painting requires not only teachers who are both 
educators and painters, but also the materials and the 
tools of the painting art. Recent educational progress in 
this fine art has not yet reached oil color, but it offers 
more promise than that in any other fine art. The gen- 
eral public can see the results and retain them more or 
less permanently and conspicuously. 

What as to efficiency in education itself ? Has this 
been either a social or a professional ideal ^ Is it not 
true that in the teeth of the fact that business men and 
social workers are calling for actors and doers, we are 
sending into the world boys and girls who are mere 
knowers and critics ? Why do we not ourselves demand 

engaged at the time in his proper business as an art producer. The critic 
has a possible function, that of the watch-dog for the public. Some 
critics who perform this function wisely deserve the gratitude of human- 
ity. ("The critic must accept what is best in a poet and thus become 
his best encourager." Stedmsin, Foe^s of America, chapter vi.) There are 
many varieties of the critic ; and every field of human activity is the 
witness of his exploits. But the critic and the creator will ever be at war, 
— often, be it confessed, in the same man. 



266 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

more years for education and meanwhile set about mak- 
ing school work really educative ? 

It IS perfectly true that in efficiency Americans have 
attained extraordinary excellence ; but this is true only 
of the men and not of the women. American women 
are characteristically less efficient than the German, the 
French, or the Swiss. ^ Even the woman teacher who, 
in America, has secured a monopoly of elementary class 
teaching is successful rather in intelligence and in the 
sex-instinct to love children than in efficiency. The ex- 
planation of the efficiency of American men lies else- 
where than in their schoolings 

The boys of America get into their life-work, their in- 
dustrial or commercial art, early ; and with a peculiar 
national tradition. It is a wonderful country for men ; 
or rather it was until the very last years of the nine- 
teenth century. "Room at the top" and "Go West, 
young man, and grow up with the country " were famous 
sayings of Daniel Webster and of Horace Greeley. 
"America," said Emerson, " is another name for oppor- 
tunity." Here the European peoples were debouching 
their vanguards in our valleys and upon our prairies and 
plains. Here were struggles, at first of Spanish, Dutch, 
English, and French ; later, of Americans, English, Irish, 
Germans ; and recently of Americans, Poles, Russian 
Jews, and Italians.^ These struggles were intellectual, 
economic, social, political, ethical, and religious. They 
resulted in the breaking up of the national groups ; and 
denationalization, in turn, produced individualization. 
The often excessive individualization that results is one 
of the largest factors in what the world calls American- 

* I speak of the whole, not of any class, and of course not of individ- 
uals. 

2 Hughes, The Making of Citizens ; Miinsterberg, The Americans. 

3 Here also is going on that tremendous and perilous social develop- 
ment of the Caucasian and the Negro in juxtaposition. 



EFFICIENCY 267 

ism. The individual, disregarding family traditions and 
social customs, seeks his own ends. His powers are lib- 
erated. His new and relatively free outlook upon the 
world suggests forthstepping into it toward some goal of 
personal desire. He strikes out for himself. 

The resources planted by Nature in our country are 
very great. The exceeding individual activity of our 
people, reinforced by group-activities and ancestral, fac- 
tional, and personal rivalries, and still further stimulated 
by climates of great heat extremes and in great variety, 
producing peoples of varying and in certain respects an- 
tagonistic temperaments, has resulted in scientific dis- 
coveries and in technical inventions surpassing those of 
any other nation in history. Not Nature, but man here, 
in the presence of these extraordinary opportunities, has 
made the United States the richest nation of all the 
world and of all the ages. This economic efficiency has 
not been the result of the common schools, but rather 
in spite of them. It has, indeed, erected special schools 
for its own maintenance and extension. The rise of 
scientific and technical schools in Germany has been the 
result of political ambitions and of a deliberate govern- 
mental policy : here it has been the result of economic 
ambitions, spontaneous, free. '' Self-made " men, who 
often have had almost no schooling in the cultural sense, 
have founded, endowed, and popularized our schools for 
economic efficiency. Their purposes have included a de- 
sire to secure more and better and cheaper servants to 
carry out their far-flung plans of industrial warfare. 

A fairly complete list of the occupations and trades 
now practiced in our country, some by multitudes, others 
by groups, would fill several pages. It would begin with 
the professions, proceed with the learned and the expert 
occupations, carry forward the arts, follow on with the 
routine industrial habitudes, involve every manner of 
business, and end in the simplest manual labor. Law, 



268 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

medicine, ministry, education, engineering : consider their 
hundred forms and processes. Journahsm, teaching, nurs- 
ing, authorship, editing : these are but suggestions. 
Music, instrumental and vocal ; the drama, the opera, 
vaudeville, the circus, painting, sculpture, landscape 
gardening, architecture : every term has many possible 
applications. Shoemaking, silk, woolen, and cotton tex- 
tile manufacture, mining of iron, coal, copper, lead, gold, 
silver, metal-working, lumbering, cattle-raising, cotton- 
and rice-planting, farming, gardening, fruit-growing, brew- 
ing, distilling : every word speaks of thousands, yes, tens 
of thousands of workers. Banking, merchandising, organ- 
izing, superintending, and employing labor, transporting 
goods by ship and by train, real estate, stock-broking, 
pawnbroking, hotel-keeping, saloon-keeping, policing, 
cooking, sewing, telegraphing, typewriting, telephoning, 
detecting, guarding criminals : these are terms almost 
vague because of the varieties and numbers of persons 
involved. Ditch-digging, road-working, hod-carrying, 
teaming, sweeping, moving household goods, carrying 
letters, bearing messages, selling newspapers: thus an- 
other part of the list begins. Moreover, there is here 
scarcely a suggestion of the thousands of lawmakers, 
executives, judges, in government. And we must try to 
put out of our minds the underworld of vice, — the vari- 
ous *' hells " whose workers and victims are constantly 
recruited from the boys and from the girls of a nation 
whose God seems to forsake them. Lastly, there is a 
kind of efficiency not to be ignored in our various para- 
sites and paupers, the worlds of excessive luxury and of 
excessive poverty, — efficiency in holding on to life. 

In early adolescence, the first symptoms of our amaz- 
ing American efficiency appear. The boy pines to go to 
work. Many girls are similarly afflicted. They desire 
"goods," property of their own to spend or to consume 
or to keep. Sometimes, their motive is the same as that 



EFFICIENCY 269 

of the boys, to make places for themselves in the world, 
but very often it is maternal, to help the younger chil- 
dren, or patriarchal, to help keep the family together by 
supporting in whole or in part the parents. Millions of 
the girls of America go from school to factory or busi- 
ness just as millions of the girls of Europe share in the 
labors of farm, dairy, and shop. 

The turning of nearly all the boys and of a constantly 
increasing proportion of the girls at thirteen, fourteen, 
or fifteen years of age into the world of work for wages 
is so essentially historical, so distinctly hereditary, so 
thoroughly human that it appears appropriate. More- 
over, it so certainly results in a narrow technical effi- 
ciency in work as to appear commendable. When the 
boy fails at school, the parent (and often the teacher 
also) cries, '' Put him to work," on the theory that the 
factory or store is really a better school for the careless, 
inattentive, disorderly, perhaps truant boy, than the 
school of education. 

It is a strange situation, worthy of an entire book by 
itself, this going to work, with mind unformed, in a civili- 
zation incredibly more complex than any hitherto known 
in the world. The economic effect upon the wages of 
adult men and women; the moral effect upon family life ; 
the physical effects, personal and racial ; the aesthetic and 
cultural effects : one does not like to contemplate these. 
Two aspects only, both of them educational, we may not 
neglect. The school wants the ability to prepare for 
economic efficiency. But for this grave defect, millions 
of boys and girls would continue at school several years 
longer than they do now. Moreover, the school itself 
suffers by the absence from the higher grades of these 
stronger-willed workers. For the truth of the matter is 
that while the boys and the girls of superior intelligence 
deliberately choose to remain at school, those of superior 
energy quit the leisurely life of study for the harder work 



270 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

of the wage-world/ Poor as the schools are, this early 
maturity of will is usually a misfortune. By the time 
that he reaches twenty-five or thirty years of age, the 
man usually wakes up to the value of an education when 
he sees that those who remained at school longer than 
he are passing him in the race of life. By the time that 
he is fifty, he knows certainly that "education pays." 
There are, of course, apparent exceptions to this rule, 
but none of them is real. A genuine education neces- 
sarily increases the efficiency as well as the intelligence 
of the individual. 

What has been said of occupation is quite as true of 
business narrowly defined as " the commercial pursuits." 
The trader in products, like the producer, — the book- 
keeper, the salesman, the banker, the merchant, like the 
bricklayer, the iron-worker, the builder, and the employ- 
ing manufacturer, — the man whose primary economic 
motive is competition, like the man whose primary motive 
is cooperation, — must find his preparation at the foot of 
the ladder after school days are over. 

Lastly, war. So rich is America, so efficient are our 
people in the industries of peace, so essentially peace- 
able are we all, that we refuse to obey the maxims, ** In 
time of peace prepare for war " and "■ The best way to 
avoid war is to be ready for it." We have no systems of 
military drill in our public schools, not even in our high 
schools.^ And yet we have fought many wars, two of 
them essentially domestic and civil, the so-called *' Revo- 
lution" and " Rebellion," both of them originating as 
insurrections against established government. In all of 

^ Webb, Industrial Democj-acy, part ii, chapters x and xi. 

2 There are a few cadet companies ; but there is no universal drilling 
of boys for military service. Yet every great nation is great partly be- 
cause of its volunteer soldiers. Where all the aristocrats are ready to do 
battle, there the nation need not fear its enemies. A mercenary army, like 
a corrupt Capital, like an hereditary class in power, displays to the dis- 
cerning the dry rot of empire. Cf. Ruskin, " War," Crown of Wild Olive. 



EFFICIENCY 271 

our wars, the regular army has been only the nucleus 
around which have gathered such militia as our Colonies 
and States could furnish and the volunteers. Militia and 
volunteers alike have been young men. Toward the 
close of the War of Secession, more than half of the 
soldiers of the United States were under twenty-one 
years of age. And yet we have always chosen to instruct 
our boys as though they were all certain to live the 
peaceful lives of women. The tale of history is the tale 
of wars ; and war has often been nearest when it has 
seemed farthest away.^ Most wars, domestic as well as 
international, come suddenly, like ''the thief in the 
night." 

As a matter of history, it may be gravely questioned 
whether he who is brought up in entire ignorance of 
drill, of arms, and of obedience and command is really 
educated for the common life of humanity. In i860, 
most men said that the slave-labor question would be 
answered by the peaceful evolution of social life. In 1906, 
they are saying the same thing of the wage-labor ques- 
tion. Who really knows what time may yet bring forth .'* 

This cursory view of the surface of American society 
for the sake of seeing whether or not our average boy or 
girl is educated for efficiency in its life may include only 
a brief survey of certain miscellaneous social relations. 
But one other people, the Chinese, have as many secret 
societies as have the Americans. Both China and Amer- 
ica have governments that interfere but little in so-called 
personal and private affairs. The result is that freedom 
of assembly has developed numberless instances of 
secrecy of assembly. The meetings of lodges, councils, 
fraternities, sororities, clubs, unions, guilds, with and 
without political, religious, educational, and economic 
features, vastly exceed in number the formal meetings 

^ William Pitt, " Roll up that map : it will not be wanted these ten 
years." After Austerlitz. Stanhope, Life of P lit, chapter xlii. 



272 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

of governing bodies, political parties, churches, colleges, 
schools. Millions of American men and tens of thousands 
of American women belong not to one only but to many 
public and secret societies.^ '* Consciousness of kind " is 
a fundamental principle, perhaps the fundamental prin- 
ciple of sociology.^ Despite this fact, the educators of 
young American democrats at school, often, it may be 
usually, try to prevent the formation of secret societies 
and sometimes of public societies. The superintendent 
of schools in a great city has pronounced secret societies 
undemocratic,^ The boys' " gang " characterizes every 
neighborhood in America, urban, suburban, village, and 
rural ; and it v^^ill always characterize American society 
so long as our government is neither a tyranny nor an 
aristocracy.^ The proposition that '* getting together " is 
dangerous is an inheritance from the days when it really 
was dangerous — to kings, to nobles, and to lords. 

If men and women are to conduct lodges and clubs 
wisely and efficiently, the timely place in which to learn 
the sciences and the arts not only of parliamentary law 
but also of social control ^ is the school. Neither parents 
nor teachers have the right to deny to children " the 
peaceable assembly " secured to themselves by public 
opinion and by the Constitution.'' 

The theatre and the opera constitute a social institu- 
tion as necessary as the court and the jail to civilized 
mankind (that is, creatures living in crowds and yet 
imaginative and aspiring, and, of course, fatigued). The 
school almost always and almost totally ignores the 
drama, — its appeal to the larger nature, its effort to 

^ The "joiner" is a well-recognized species of the American social 
man. 

2 Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. 17. 

^ Superintendent E. G. Cooley, Chicago, special report, 1905. 

* Puffer, *' Boys' Gangs," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1905. 

^ Ross, Social Control, chapter xiv. 

8 Amendments, Article I. 



EFFICIENCY 273 

realize the good and evil of the human heart, its frivolity 
and its passionateness. The boy or girl, released or 
escaped from the school, suddenly finds in the theatre 
instruction in the comedy and in the tragedy of human 
life by impersonation with a skill so incredible to the 
childish mind that the acting is more real than Hving. 
Strange as it may seem, there is a panacea for this delu- 
sion of the school and factory children and street gamins, 
become, one and all, "gallery gods" in the city theatre, 
— and this panacea is the play at school.^ 

There is a recreation more valuable to the inhabit- 
ant of the city than the drama, and this is the summer 
vacation in the open country, in the woods, or by the sea. 
To be able to return to Nature is not a gift, but an edu- 
cation. In every year for the civic folk a month in the 
forest-camp or in the tent-on-the-beach ! To know how 
to enjoy it ! To know how to play in the world as God 
makes it ! Why should not the school prepare us for this 
return to Paradise ? 

^ I have been told many times by boys and girls sixteen to eighteen 
years of age, who left school at the close of the compulsory term, that 
their main object in so doing was " to get money to go to the theatre." 
In this exaggeration, there was no little truth. The movement for .school 
dramatics for all ages of children is psychologically correct. 



CHAPTER XIII 

MORALITY 

Plus on sais, plus on peut. — Edmond About, A B C du Travailleur, p. 39. 

Duty is not the child of a birth to-day or yesterday, but hath been, no man knoweth how 
long since. — Sophocles, A niig-one. 

Our lives make a moral tradition for individual selves, as the life of mankind at large 
makes a moral tradition for the race. — George Eliot, Romola, chapter xxxix. 

Every man contains in himself the elements of all the rest of humanity. Some time or 
other to each must come the consciousness of this larger life. In acceptnig as his own 
the life of others, he becomes aware of a life in himself that has no limit and no end. — 
Carpenter, Civilization, its Cause and Cure, pp. 126, 128. 

No perfect man has ever walked this earth. Even the 
blessed Master was only sinless, not complete ; as a per- 
son only innocent, not infinite. He never undertook the 
relations of husband and father, of captain of armies, or 
of artist, of engineer, or of employer, ruler, or lord of 
any kind in church, state, land, goods. As for the rest, 
whether hero-saints or men of genius, whatsoever their 
qualities, they all fail in perfect righteousness at the bar 
of the courts of even this world. 

Caesar was a grievous failure. He flooded the Western 
world with the light of his genius, in Spain and in France 
gave Europe its foundations, mapped out the Roman 
Empire, wrote laws and histories ; but of his personal 
life he made nothing else or less than a botch. His very 
death was due to personal mannerisms and methods. 
Napoleon with perhaps equal genius flooded Europe with 
democracy, tearing away old traditions, and irrigating 
many a desert in the human spirit, but failed even more 
ignominiously ^ than Caesar, — for his failure was not 
only in the private relations of life, but also in the 

^ Byron, ChilJe Harold, Canto iii. A truthful contemporaneous picture. 



MORALITY 275 

public. And Cromwell, perhaps the greatest of all Eng- 
lishmen of action, was a dismal failure in the fundamental 
morality of human sympathy. Neither Washington nor 
Lincoln, neither Franklin nor Emerson, was altogether 
sound-to-the-core, — outwardly gracious, inwardly sub- 
stantial, in public ready for all enterprises, in private 
wholly good. The roll of great and good women may be 
called : some were never wives and mothers, others knew 
nothing save religion, others despised art and society, and 
all failed in more ways than one, as all the finite must 
fail. We have but to compare great men with one another 
to see how partial in his excellence each one is and how 
serious in his deficiency. Consider that greatest of all 
American names in theology, Jonathan Edwards, and 
link with his name that of Benjamin Franklin. It is like 
a comparison of Dante with Shakespeare.^ Or consider 
those two men of " universal genius," Michael Angelo 
and Goethe. How narrow and how shallow the universal 
genius seems to be ! The devoted physician wrecks his 
health to tend the diseases of humanity, and dies, leaving 
a broken-hearted wife and orphan children, often poor, 
and sometimes penniless. A captain of industry revolu- 
tionizes the industry, enriches himself and perhaps many 
others, cheapening his products for the markets of half 
a world, and dies with never a good deed to his credit in 
religion or in government, in culture or in charity. Or a 
poet crystallizes in new forms the spirit of a great and 
different people, for he is a seer. But he has never lifted 
his hand to labor or sung one verse for righteousness. 
The pantheons of nations are indeed many; but there is 
none perfect therein, — no, not one ! 

So difficult is morality that, though quick to express 
judgments of individuals, most men and women refuse 
to discuss or even to consider its general themes. The 
moral judgment is more frequently exercised by us than 

» Chancellor-Hewes, The United States : A History, vol. ii, p. 471. 



276 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

any other. ''Good" and "bad," and their equivalents, 
are the commonest words in the languages of men. *'I 
don't like John or Mary," says one, to be asked in reply, 
" Why not ? " and to answer, '* Because he is mean or 
stingy or hateful or deceitful," or something else that 
is immoral. Morality becomes, therefore, a topic to be 
avoided in education, but invariably relied upon as an 
assured by-product. Is it possible to avoid this? Is it 
desirable to try to do so ? 

In no age have the consciences of the best men en- 
dorsed the morals of most. And yet human morahty has 
improved. Is it possible to accelerate the rate of im- 
provement by deliberate planning and working ? If not, 
then all our criminal laws and sanctions, and all our 
religious activities of the past have availed nothing ; and 
the progress actually achieved has been no greater than 
it would have been without them. Nay more : these may 
have actually retarded the moral advance by natural 
(that is, unreflecting) evolution. The common sense 
of mankind objects to such a conclusion. On the con- 
trary, mankind is looking for social machinery adequate 
to undertake and to accomplish the task of universal 
betterment.^ 

In this task, three stages are presented. First, a suffi- 
cient number of sufficiently intelligent persons must be 
found to undertake wisely the direction of the enterprises 
of the various social institutions and of all the miscella- 
neous, heterogeneous, disassociated activities of mankind 
that we now group arbitrarily in the " sphere of liberty." 
Next, these consistent enterprises and these vigorous 
activities must be sufficiently correlated upon principles 
and by laws that they will work together for the good of 
mankind with common consent. To discover these prin- 
ciples and to frame these laws is the first business of the 
wise men : their second is to persuade the rest to accept 

1 Ward, Psychic Factors in Civilization, chapter xxxiv. 



MORALITY 277 

them. And, third, there must stir and there must be 
stirred in the social mind and in the body pohtic suffi- 
cient motives to set and to keep the entire machine at 
work. Obviously, each stage is higher and harder than 
the preceding. 

The first requisite is clear intelligence. Ours is a civili- 
zation so vast that few may compass it, so intricate and 
so tortuous that few may follow its ways, so dark that 
few may see its facts. But the second test of individual 
and social preparation for the task is still more severe. 
Intelligence must add to itself effectiveness, the will 
to do, working-and-transforming power. The panorama 
displays millions of persons, whom the wise observer un- 
derstands. Is he more than an observer .? What has he 
the strength and the desire to do for them ? There are 
workers enough among them, strong-willed men, who 
must often be shouldered aside or knocked down that 
truth and right may be cleared from their trampling 
feet. The man who would do work worth doing for his 
kind must have power to do it against every kind of op- 
position, including often that of those whom he would 
befriend.^ And yet another qualification is set for the 
task. Intelligence and power of will must add to them- 
selves morality ; and what is this ? No simple thing, but 
indeed the most complicated of all things, a composite 
of many lives, a reflex of ages shining in the soul, the 
spirit that knows and loves whatever promotes life and 
knows and hates whatever injures life. For this is the 
test. For this Jesus came.^ 

No age or land has ever known perfectly moral indi- 
viduals ; and as certainly no age or people has ever dis- 

^ " The fully developed man knows in every situation in life just exactly 
what he can do and therefore must do and does it." Caldwell, Schopen- 
hauer's Syste77i in its Philosophical Significance, p. 20 r. 

2 Saleeby, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1906, " The Testimony of Biology 
to Religion," and Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, The Will to Live, third 
essay. 



278 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

played a perfectly moral society. Noble Athens had so 
many immoralities that it seems almost immoral : and 
yet if Athens was essentially immoral, then morality is 
a contradiction in terms. Athens loved life and, for many 
of its own citizens and for untold thousands since her 
great day, made life beautiful. In so far as Athens loved 
life, dignifying and ennobling it, she was moral. He dig- 
nifies life who makes it seem desirable, essentially worth 
while ; and he ennobles it who makes of life an art. He 
whose life makes others aspire for equal life lives mor- 
ally. And what is life ? To see, to will, to feel ever more 
abundantly, for life is growth. Thus Athens magnified 
life, evolving great persons, — Plato, Sophocles, Phidias, 
Pericles, Aspasia. 

Mother England, whose children have gone forth to 
America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, has dis- 
played so many immoralities as to seem almost immoral. 
Yet England has loved life, rnultiplying her children and 
sending them forth lusty and strong to possess the earth. 
She has evolved not only great persons, magnifying life, 
but very many such persons, multiplying lives. 

From certain points of view, France and Italy, resting 
in the balance between the tides, seem immoral ; and yet 
France made perfect for this modern age the industrial 
arts, and Italy made perfect the fine arts. Together, 
they have given to us much — it may be, most — of the 
glory and excellence of our culture. The immoral can- 
not achieve such frankness and beauty. 

Nevertheless, in history the liberalizing of life and the 
increasing of the numbers of the living have often pro- 
ceeded when the heart of society was unsound. A great 
tree grows with rot at its centre until storm overthrows 
it or it breaks of its own weight. So with societies of 
men. The rot of society we call immorality because it 
eats out the heart of life, which is morality. 

God, the giver of life, is good. He who thinks not so 



MORALITY 279 

is a hater or a despiser of life. The moral man thinks 
highly of life, prizes it, desires to avoid death, which is 
the apparent, the earthly bound of life, and desires to 
avoid disease and accident, which limit life. He cares for 
his health, which increases life. Moreover, he loves the 
living, his fellow men, and in particular he loves children, 
whose lives are to endure after his own is terminated 
here ; and he loves women, the bearers of life. More- 
over, his love of life, of children, of women is such that 
he lives, works, wars, and dies for them ; boldly, always, 
and as matter of course. 

Therefore, the moral man loves God and fears Him, 
— loves because God gives and enlarges life, and fears 
because He visits sin with disease and death. 

The precepts of morality grow more numerous and 
difficult as men grow in knowledge, character, and virtue, 
and as they increase in numbers and in variety of social 
relations. 

There is a morality of the body. " Wash you, make 
you clean." ^ Dirt invites the microbes of disease, the 
dealers in pain and in death. Every great religion has 
emphasized the physiologic truth that cleanliness pro- 
motes immunity from disease. And why not ? Did not 
man come up out of the clean sea scarcely an aeon ago ? 
The body has the right to be clean, to be cleaned as 
soon as dirt or soil forms or falls upon it.^ 

Yet we build schoolhouses in which dirty children must 
get dirtier and stay in their dirt, involving all in the general 
misfortune. And the city poor, through the day deprived of 
the cleansing of the free air of the fields and sky, at night 
languish at home without baths. 

^ Isaiah i, 16. It is the saying of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. 
Many modern men have forgotten the foundations as given in the Mosaic 
Code. 

2 Curtis, Nature and Health, and Stinson, The Right Life, discuss these 
themes of a prescriptive morality. 



28o THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Eating is a moral duty. Jesus established eating and 
drinking as the basis and form and structure of a re- 
ligious sacrament.^ The metabolism of food is miracu- 
lous. No scientist has yet disclosed this mystery. Eating 
good food, properly chewed, is life-getting. One must 
eat enough and often enough, not too much or too often ; 
and one must fast in season. 

Here poverty strikes with such cruelty that the pitiful 
challenge the goodness of an omnipotent God. Or is He not 
omnipotent, though perfectly good ? I have seen too much of 
life, too many of the living, not to know how terrible and how 
common the lack of sufficient good food is. The starving 
children, the overworked and underfed mothers and fathers, 
the graves of the dead who died of innutrition and its diseases 
are forever before the city school superintendent.^ Lack of 
proper food causes more drunkenness than all other causes 
combined : and drunkenness causes more crimes than all 
other causes combined. Poverty fills our jails and peniten- 
tiaries ; and the prevention of poverty is precisely the most 
important and the most difficult task of modern statesmanship. 

To sleep is to be moral. In sleep, one finds life. He 
v^ho wakes out of sufficient sleep is new born. This, too, 
is miracle. Mechanical explanations analyze ; but the 
secret is beyond all analysis. The length and the fre- 
quency of sleep must be such that the body is never 
wholly fatigued. Dirt, hunger, fatigue ; these are the 
traitors that betray the body to its enemy, disease. The 
" new medicine " of the twentieth century is mainly 

1 " Unfortunately, while we argue the question of social responsibility 
against individual responsibility, of the paternal State against the demo- 
cratic with its dogma of equality of opportunity, children are starving for 
want of food. The modern State cannot now, for its own sake, refuse to 
provide that necessary physical nourishment which alone can make the 
mental food palatable and nourishing." Hughes, The Making of Citizens, 
p. 24. 

2 Hunter, P(werty ; Spargo, T/u Bitter Cry of the Children ; George, 
Progress and 'Poverty ; Ghent, Our Benevolent Feicdalism ; Wallace, 
This Wonderful Century. 



MORALITY 281 

directed to vitalizing the blood, the life-currents, — along 
which the soul flashes ; and for which organs, tissues, and 
bones are but springs, channels, reservoirs, and filters. 
In vitalizing the blood, the first process is cleansing it 
in sleep. 

To waken any one is a sin, but especially to waken a grow- 
ing child.^ To prevent sleep by noise or by disturbance, by 
excitement or by stimulant of whatsoever kind, alcohol or drug 
or narcotic, is fullness of sin ; it is malice against life. To go 
to bed early enough to insure sufficient time for sleep is a 
moral duty. Many a sick child and man has died because of 
violent awakening. 

In a certain city, a sleepy physician took a strong drink to 
get himself awake to finish the duties of the day ; and the 
day was very long. He was in bed that night but two hours. 
His appetite for food slackened. Three days of increasing 
duties and of increasing alcoholic stimulants followed. A 
change in the weather brought on a chill ; still other drinks ; 
a cold night ride to visit a distant patient; and pneumonia 
set in. Ten physicians and four nurses fought for him for 
two days, when death came. And a hospital had to secure a 
new chief-surgeon, a city a new mayor, and hundreds of homes 
a new family physician ; all for want of sleep. 

American economic life, especially in factories and 
mines, upon railroads and railways, and American domes- 
tic life little heed the requirements of the body to rest 
in sleep. Therefore, the regime must pass. Into what 
it shall pass, no man can yet see. But human nature 
cannot and will not endure its present burdens. It is the 
ending of an era. 

The human body is periodic ^ and regular in its pro- 
cesses. It needs a day in every seven for rest, and bene- 
fits by two days, one of rest, one of change. The body 
is not a machine, but an organism. On the seventh day, 

1 Curtis, Nature a^id Health, p. 297. 

2 This periodicity is of day and night, of weeks, of moon-months, of 
seasons, and of terms of years. Cf. Hall, Adolescence, chapter vii. 



I 282 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

**thou shalt not do any work," thou nor thy wife nor thy 
son nor thy clerk nor thy hireling : it is the moral law, 
founded in the human body. 

The sin of our economic regime that forces millions 
of women to work under overseers, in defiance of their 
periodic life, often when bearing or nursing children, is 
upon this people, upon our legislators, upon our educat- 
ors as well as upon our manufacturers, our merchants, 
our consumers, and upon our husbands.^ And the retri- 
bution is as certain as history is certain. Who cares 
whether the babies perish and the mothers grow faint 
and fade away ? Examine the statistics. Read the tale 
of past nations. Go about among the people. He who 
knows the truth, who has seen things as they were and 
are knows who He is that cares. 

There are moral laws of Property, of the Family, of 
the Church, of the State, of the School, of Culture, of 
Occupation, of Business, and of General Society. Only 
war has no moral law : ^ "all is fair in war." War is the 
antitheme of every moral law, for it destroys life, cus- 
toms, habits, social relations, and affection, and sets in 
their places death and ruin, pain and hatred. 

The physical laws of morality are personal. All others 
are social in origin, personal in application. To sleep, to 
eat, to bathe ; these the solitary man on an island ought 
to do regularly and frequently, that he may be inwardly 
and outwardly clean and full of health. But to him most 
other moral laws are ''dead letter," for he has no neigh- 
bors to love and to help. Where two or three are 
gathered, there comes in the new and larger morality. 
The lonely hermit has no property of his own to preserve, 
no property of others to respect, for property is a social 
institution. He may have religion, but can have' no 

^ Particularly, upon our publicists and thinkers. 

2 " It is the strain of murder that is the inheritance of the sons of men." 
Joubert, The Tsar as He is, p. 293. 



MORALITY 283 

church ; may exercise some art, but can engage in no 
commerce. 

Property is either real or personal : in general, real 
estate is land, and personalty is everything else.^ Now, 
in a civilized society nearly every birth is due to, or at 
least quaUfied by, the assurance of its conditions and the 
expectation of its continuance. I am not merely con- 
ditioned by my environment, I am in reality produced 
by it. This environment, therefore, this civilized society 
owes me perhaps not a share in its rights and goods, but 
surely owes certain rights and goods. What society 
owes to the individual, whose coming into life it causes,^ 
constitutes both the total social obligation to the indi- 
vidual and the total personal right as against society. 
Morality requires the performance of this obligation by 
the acknowledgment of this right, and by action accord- 
ingly. And the requirement is more than merely the 
vaunted "democratic equality of opportunity," 

What the total obligation is, of course, conditions the 
total right; and is itself conditioned by the nature of 
the society. We have heard so much of the duty of the 
individual to society and of the rights of society against 
the individual, that this argument may perhaps- find 
some difificulty of lodgment in minds that almost inevit- 
ably have prejudged and closed the case. Because of 
society, indeed by the very force of social precept and 
example, of social organization and operation, men and 
women marry and beget offspring and are enabled to 
rear them. 

We may classify civilized societies in two groups, — 

^ For the legal distinctions and exceptions vide Washburn, Real Pro- 
perty ; Gray, Cases in Real Prope7-ty. 

^ Of all the thoughtlessness of mankind, there is perhaps nothing 
more common or striking than the absence of thought that I, the indi- 
vidual, am here, because antecedent social conditions permitted my birth 
and rearing. Reverence for the Past is but filial gratitude to the true 
parent of us all. Cf. Plato, Laws, xii. 



284 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

those which have already turned all their lands over to 
private ownership and those which still have unoccupied 
public lands in their vicinage. With private property in 
land what it now is, — the right by title, guaranteed by 
government law and force, to exclude all others irrespect- 
ive of the owners' use or mode of use of the property 
and irrespective of the use proposed by all others (save 
in certain instances, when the property may be taken by 
condemnation proceedings), — the first group of commun- 
ities must contain two classes of citizens, the landed and 
the landless, the **rich," so-called, and the proletariat. 

But every child born into life has a natural right to 
place, to sunlight, to air, and to water, — that is, a natural 
right to life. To that end, God gave the life in the womb. 
And every child has a social right to a mother's milk and 
to a Another's care and to that minimum of support, 
preparation, and opportunity which will enable him or 
her to live out a normal term of years. 

Every right is a minimum of expectancy of the per- 
sistence of conditions ; which is to say that every right 
is a vested right. Every right is a psychological condi- 
tion resultant from a sociological situation. The denial 
of a right is, therefore, a mental shock, from which men- 
tal insanity may, and not seldom does, result. This is 
equally true whether the right is based on conditions 
clearly of ethical advantage to society or to the individ- 
ual, or is based on conditions more or less injurious to 
all concerned. 

No child yet born has failed to be surprised when he learns 
that his parents do not own their "own house " or quarters, 
but must pay rent to a landlord for them. When he first learns 
that the "house " is not " mine " or " ours," a shock results 
from which there is no moral recovery. To this child, home 
and property are terms with false meanings thereafter. Born 
with the idea of absolute right in his birthplace, the right 
expressed in the popular saying, "An Englishman's house is 



MORALITY 285 

his castle," once let him realize that he is but a wanderer and 
sojourner, and his universe has lost its centre. It is not pos- 
sible to measure how much immorality is due to this unmoor- 
ing of life.^ 

Wife-beating is a right in various countries. In a certain 
city of the East, a wife-beater and the frequently beaten wife 
were haled into court by the neighbors for disturbing the 
public peace. When sentenced and fined, the husband broke 
down utterly. His " liberty " had been taken away, his family 
disintegrated. The wife was scarcely less moved from her 
foundations. The effect upon her was that of suddenly giving 
sight to the blind, while that upon him was like the loss of 
an oar by a boatman in a swift current. 

Much of the progress of society depends upon the 
reduction of rights ; not the restoration of a simple prim- 
itive equality, but the construction of an elaborate civil- 
ized equality. And yet the rest of the progress of society- 
depends upon the maintenance of the essential rights, 
inhering in man from birth by virtue of the human or 
even the more ancient animal nature. Such a risfht, in- 
disputable, though often denied, in fact, is the right to 
a part of the earth for room to live, to breathe, to eat, to 
marry, to sleep, to die. Society organized in the universal 
institution of government has permitted, indeed has 
encouraged the partition of all the land to the living, and 
then has encouraged their multiplication by promoting 
marriage, peace, and hygiene. A transformation, there- 
fore, begins immediately. The added generations and 
the unsuccessful are, or become, landless. Society soon 
consists of landlords and tenants, only a few being house- 
owners without tenantry. In the cities^ the multitude 
must pay at stated intervals to privileged individuals 
various sums of money for the use of their privilege to 

^ " Whilst another man has no land, my title to mine, your title to 
yours, is at once vitiated." Emerson, "Man the Reformer," Nature, Ad- 
dresses, and Lectures. 



286 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

exclude them from the land, that is, they must pay for 
the right to live upon land, a right, be it repeated, that is 
inherent in life itself. 

A certain philosophic defense has been attempted, to the ef- 
fect that rent-payment is commutation of war avoided or fore- 
gone. The new-born babe is not required to fight for a spot 
upon which to go on breathing, but by a money-payment 
from his parents may commute the natural necessity to fight. 

Of course, that defense of the advantage taken by private 
property apologists of true economic rent (the Ricardian rent 
of "the dismal science"), which says that there is plenty of 
"no-rent land," is both fallacious and malicious. It is fal- 
lacious in that there is literally no land in America without 
an owner who does not exclude all trespassers. There may 
be land earning no real economic rent, but there is none to be 
had for homestead use without price for fee-simple or for an- 
nual or other hire. The price may be very low ; but the argu- 
ment in the main text asserts that the right to breathing- 
space is absolute, and therefore the space must be as free 
as life itself; which life the Creator makes compulsory for 
sane men and women and children. Such is the fallacy. 
The malice consists in this : Man is by nature gregarious. In 
this age, the horde does not run in the fields or make clearings 
in the forests, dwelling in a communism that would be indeed 
anachronous ; but it settles in the town, which grows into the 
city perforce of modern domestic and international peace 
and of industrial progress. Private property, extending itself 
beyond any ancient powers of savage force or feudal custom by 
means of documentary titles and constitutional government, 
fines mankind for our strongest and most commendable char- 
acteristic, our joy in neighborliness, our sociability, our abso- 
lutely necessary desire "to get together," and universal habit 
of doing so.^ 

The moral law of society is, therefore, prescriptive of 

^ I propose no remedy. The disease is political and legal in its origin, 
not educational. But I see no prospect of relief through either socialism 
or anarchy. The problem appears to be rather municipal than national. 



MORALITY 287 

the right of every individual to land, — that is, free land. 
This is proper to him. Decency requires the recogni- 
tion by society of this right. 

What else the moral law of society prescribes with 
respect to the institution of Property is comparatively 
clear. Every individual has the right to his own product 
and to gifts of the products of others ; and he has no 
right to anything more. Stated otherwise, the moral law 
assures no right to levy upon the products or services of 
others, no right to get from other individuals something 
for nothing. 

In a genuine morality, a morality without hypocrisy, 
a morality willing to see things as Jesus saw them, we 
are brought face to face with this law, — "Come, follow 
Me," ^ who have nothing. " Give us this day our daily 
bread." "The laborer is worthy of his hire;"^ and to 
every man a penny a day.^ 

In these days of new and strange extensions of private 
property, the pretensions of the beneficiaries become im- 
moral, and provoke barbarous reprisals by the victims ; 
but the worst result is the setting-in of racial degenera- 
tion, strictly inevitable when essential rights are violated. 
We need to think what wealth may properly be private. 
When we shall have formed a more correct definition, and 
when men working in governments shall have recon- 
structed law to conform to morality, then we may all 
become once more admirers and respecters of private 
property as it really is.^ Property that is really wealth 
proper to the possessor is the bedrock of civilization, 
more ancient and more necessary than marriage and 

^ Luke, Gospel, xviii, 22. 

2 Luke, Gospel, x, 7, where the hire is lodging, eating, and drinking. 

^ Matthew, Gospel, xx, 9, 

* "The happiness of a people depends upon the degree of promptitude 
with which the gulf between social necessities and established law is nar- 
rowed." Maine, Ancient Law, p, 23. 



288 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

family. Respecting such true property, secured by effort 
or by free gift, and not by stealing, direct or indirect, 
open or covert, the moral law is against not only actually 
stealing it but against even coveting it, as Moses said 
more than two millenniums ago.^ 

As the moral law regarding Property is social, involv- 
ing at least two, go also is the Family. We have now 
risen one stage higher in the social scale. The Fam- 
ily is a physical relation of parent and child, mother 
and father, publicly acknowledged throughout life, so 
that in an advanced society the physical aspect is subor- 
dinated to the free recognition of the relationship, which 
thereby becomes idealized or, as we say, spiritualized. 
History has known many varieties of the Family, — the 
polyandrous, the polygynous, the patriarchal, the matri- 
archal, and the monogamous, free and strict. Christian 
civilization in the West has indorsed the monogamous 
Family, and is now struggling with the vital question 
whether or not to permit not contemporaneous but suc- 
cessive polygamies through the marriage of divorced 
persons. 

In building up the strictly monogamous Family (di- 
vorce and even separation denied in State and in Church) 
five ideals have been developed, unique in the history of 
animal life upon the earth and of singular portent. 
These five ideals appeared in this order, — female vir- 
ginity, female chastity, male chastity, male virginity, 
and continence in marriage. These severe ideals have 
had an exactly opposite effect upon population from that 
which might have been anticipated. The more closely 
and generally they have been maintained, the more 
numerous have been the births, the longer the lives, and 
the lower the death-rates. Prostitution, a notion beyond 
the understanding of a primitive horde, developed in 

^ This is said without prejudice as to whether or not Moses wrote 
Exodus and revealed the Decalogue, as many believe. 



MORALITY 289 

polyandrous and polygamous societies into the dignity 
of a religious ceremony, to descend in monogamous soci- 
eties to a concealed and ashamed commercial activity, 
and has at last been put under the ban of the public 
law, surviving as "the social evil." Almost equally 
abashed though not yet equally rebuked, male wanton- 
ness is declining. The moral law is not yet fully clear 
on all the matters involved. But society is beginning to 
see that to call into life a human being whom the parents 
cannot properly support and educate is a sin, and that 
for society to neglect a child, even though thus actually 
brought into life, is a yet greater sin. And society, more 
or less consciously and conscientiously, approves the life 
of that man or woman to whom marriage is a sacrament 
and a covenant before God and man, to be fulfilled with 
absolute honor. The excuses prevalent a hundred years 
ago, in certain regions of Christendom, and among cer- 
tain classes of religious and secular men and even women, 
for promiscuity before marriage are no longer made pub- 
licly. An equal faithfulness is demanded of both man 
and woman, and celibacy is required to be synonymous 
with virginity. And everywhere celibacy is discouraged. 
It is a curious and apparently contradictory movement 
in an age of the economic freedom of woman. These 
movements conspire for the equality of the sexes. 

On this foundation of clean marriage, there is built the 
new moral law that every parent owes to every child an 
education, and that the State is a proper social instru- 
ment to give to the child such an education, taxing (par- 
tially confiscating) any property for that purpose. 

There are other moral laws of the Family. To the 
father and mother who work to support and care for 
their children until they are able decently to care for 
themselves, the children owe obedience and faith. And 
grown sons and daughters, not invalid, owe to aged or 
otherwise invalid parents support in their infirmity. In 



290 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

this age of the dispersion of families, many have for- 
gotten that " blood is thicker than water ; " and bro- 
thers and sisters, not to mention uncles and nephews, 
aunts and nieces and cousins, of one or two removes, 
seldom recognize relationship as of any special moment. 
Lineal descent seems alone to count ; and modern moral- 
ity scarcely enforces the ancient family affection. 
Whether this can be recovered without the pressure of 
an era of severe social distress through famine, riot, or 
war, is doubtful ; but that in losing the diffused affec- 
tions of the ancient patriarchal family society has lost 
not only one of its charms but also one of its sources of 
strength is certain. 

There are moral laws of religion unrecognized by 
millions to-day. Religion is, of course, not synonymous 
with the Church ; and may not be coterminous with it. 
Religion is capable of various definitions. But whether 
we call it a sense of the disposition of the Universe (or 
God) toward ourselves,^ or belief in the ultimate con- 
servation of values,^ or desire to be holy,^ or indeed any- 
thing else that recognizes its essential property, which 
is the consciousness of relation between the whole and 
man, sound moraUty requires that every person should 
deliberately and constantly keep in mind that relation- 
ship, and act in accordance with whatever light may issue 
from this consciousness of himself as part of a whole. In 
the terms of the Christian religion, morality requires 
obedience to conscience, and also persistent effort to 
enlighten conscience with all truth. 

Now the relation of the Church to religion is that, in 
any given age and land the Church displays its institution, 
and constitutes its objective realization or embodiment, 

1 Perry, Approach to Philosophy, chapter iii. 

2 Hoffding (Fisher), The Problems of Philosophy,1^6.iiox's Introduction. 

3 Watson, The Philosophy of Kant (excerpts), p. 294, Critique of the 
Practical Reasojt. 



MORALITY 291- 

of course, always imperfectly. And the peculiarities of 
this particular age and land — America in the first 
decades of the twentieth century — are that religion is 
not a universal activity, but only partial, and that even 
the religious do not all unite in one general Church. 
We have, it is true, so far as we have any religion at all, 
apparently but one religion, Christianity. And yet be- 
neath the appearance certain differences of moment are 
discovered. We have Judaism, the mother-religion of 
Christianity ; Roman Catholic Christianity with its his- 
torical desire for universality ; Protestantism with its 
hierarchical, presbyterian, and democratic sects ; Mor- 
monism with its desire to reunite Church and State, a 
pseudo-Christianity of portentous menace ; and miscella- 
neous sects from Ethical Culture to the religious com- 
munities and from Christian Science to the basest sor- 
ceries.^ Woven in among all these, there are millions of 
atheists, infidels, secularists, of every shade from those 
who forget God, though treating His creatures fairly, to 
those who despise Him and hate His children and all 
His works. 

In such an era, needing religious and moral regenera- 
tion, and needing also, it would appear, both religious 
and moral unity, or at least consistency, the beginning 
of social reform and of personal education is " the fear 
of the Lord." It is no doubt possible to worship God in 
temples not made with hands ; ^ but man in civiliza- 
tion has chosen to erect houses of worship, — tem- 
ples, mosques, kiosks, synagogues, churches, cathedrals. 
Therein they gather regularly whose fear of the Lord 
is not an occasional or startling terror, but a humble 
desire to know His will and to live in obedience to Him. 

» Carroll, T/if Religiotis Forces of the U. S., passim. Also, advertise- 
ments in metropolitan newspapers. 

2 Paul, Acts, vii, 48. Bryant, Forest Hymn, has rich meaning in this 
connection. 



292 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

The moral law requires such obedience, whether we 
pray to God in the closet ^ or openly. The moral law 
requires such outward acts as issue from a heart genu- 
inely responsive to the voice of God in the conscience. 
That the observances of times, seasons, missions, festi- 
vals, fasts, sacraments, charities of a religious nature con- 
duce to the sensitiveness of conscience, few doubt. That 
the Church, which organizes and maintains such observ- 
ances, is essential to the preservation of religion from 
generation to generation, few doubt. And they who 
doubt have never shown themselves serious and anxious 
to elevate the morals of mankind, never. The moral law 
seems, therefore, to require support of the Church as 
the preserver of the forms and times of religion and 
worship. 

To say this and not more is to represent the Church 
as in sad plight. The individual does owe allegiance 
to the Church as the outward form of religion. But 
the Church has a duty to the individual, to every in- 
dividual born into the world, which, to speak plainly, 
most of its servitors, clerical and lay, have neglected and 
perhaps forgotten. The Church absolutely denies its 
mission when it requires application and examination for 
membership. The Church is "the Bride of the Lamb," 
to use the figure of the Apocalypse. It is the visible 
symbol upon earth of the omnipresent, eternal, omni- 
potent God, who cannot forget one of His children, not 
even the least; nay more, not even the sparrows.^ The 
Church must forego every division, cease every exclu- 
sion, and proceed to the work of saving all. "Go ye, 
preach the gospel to every creature." "Whosoever will, 
let him take the water of life freely." ^ 

^ A saying of Jesus, Matthew, Gospel, vi, 6. 
2 John, Revelation, xi.x, 7 ; Jesus, Matthew, Gospel, x, 29. 
^ Mark, Gospel, xvi, 15, the last saying of Jesus, according to the oldest 
of the Gospels; John, KcvdatioHy xxii, 17. 



MORALITY 293 

Any view or practice contrary to the text appears to 
afford three objections to its moral soundness. First, 
" God hath made of one blood all nations of the earth " 
is true whether taken as a matter of religious faith or of 
scientific proof, and whether man be of but one stock 
or polygenetic ; the synthesis of bodies and souls by 
heredity is complete.^ Second, the State aims at uni- 
versality. Can the Church, an older and more widespread 
institution, do less ? Third, the School is developing the 
same purpose, drawing its inspiration from the Church, 
its organization from the State. Is the School to replace 
the Church } 

In this age and land, when government is over all, 
when kings and outlaws alike are unknown, the State, 
which is the objective expression of government, claims 
and endeavors to enforce the allegiance of all. It is fight- 
ing for sincerity of soul with that strange new interest 
of mankind. Business, which is trying to subordinate 
government to its own particular and discordant ends. 
But the very fight bears witness to the accepted prestige 
of the State as the dominant and paramount social insti- 
tution. Said Edmund Burke, a hundred years ago : — 

" [The State] is a partnership in all science ; a partnership 
in all art ; a partnership in every virtue, — and in all perfec- 
tion. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained 
in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only be- 
tween those who are living, but between those who are living, 
those who are dead, and those who are to be born. . . . The 
municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not 
morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations 
of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear 
asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to 
dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of 
elementary principles. ... If that which is only submission 
to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is 

^ Hall, Adolescence : its Psychology, chapter x,/'ass/jn. 



294 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

broken, nature is dissolved, and the rebellious are outlawed, 
cast forth, and exiled from the world of reason, and order, 
and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the anta- 
gonistic world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and un- 
availing sorrow." ^ 

The first moral law of the State is to give security to 
life, to liberty, and to property (or to "the pursuit of 
happiness," as Jefferson phrased it in the Declaration). 
It constructs the social order, its form and substance. 
A State that permits preventable injury to life is im- 
moral. A State that permits any form of slavery or servi- 
tude is immoral. A State that permits preventable losses 
of property or damage to it — that does not conserve all 
true wealth and protect all private and public property, 
righteously produced and acquired — is immoral. 

Because the State is the intellect of modern society, 
it requires for its service the ablest men. The second 
moral law for the State is to secure the ablest men for 
the conduct of its affairs. 

American government — our democracy — persists in the 
two superstitions, vox populi, vox Dei^ and the least govern- 
ment the best government; with their inevitable results. 
They were exposed long ago by Plato and by Aristotle ; and 
they were much discussed by the Fathers of this Republic in 
the Constitutional Convention of 1787.2 One of these results 
is that we American democrats suppose that if the legislature 
of all the people intends to legislate well, then all the govern- 
ment is necessarily good. To suppose this is to be unmindful 
of the fact that the executive department is quite as important 
as the legislative.^ Another result is that in order to have 
a weak government, the common political purpose of most 
Americans, very weak men have been tolerated in office. In 

^ Reflections on the French Revolution ; also, William, Bishop of Ar- 
magh, National Review^ "Edmund Burke" (February, 1906). 

2 Chancellor-Hewes, The United States : A History, vol. iii, chapter x. 

^ As every lawyer, jurist, and publicist knows : judges and executives 
make laws as well as unmake them. 



MORALITY 29s 

Nation, State, County, City, and Village, the average intel- 
ligence of the officers scarcely rises above the average intelli- 
gence of successful business men. We have had not only 
mediocre Governors but mediocre Presidents, and as for City 
Aldermen and State Legislatures, the facts are so notorious 
as to have become irritating commonplaces. 

A third moral lawof the State is so to exercise its pov^rers 
and to perform its functions as to promote the vi^elfare 
of society. " Unto whomsoever much is given, of him 
shall much be required," ^ is a saying quite as true of 
institutions as of individuals. The State is paramount, 
its opportunities are surpassing, and its responsibilities, 
despite denials, are, therefore, correspondingly great and 
heavy.2 It is, of course, unwarranted to expect progress 
to result uniformly and rapidly ; but the excuse, so often 
heard, that this Nation or State, County or City, Town 
or Village is no worse than some other is no more valid 
for political sins of omission or of commission than are 
the similar excuses of individuals. It is unnecessary to 
discuss here the applications or the details of this gen- 
eral principle. The moral law is that to be content with 
things as they are is to deteriorate. The statesman, 
whether ruler or subject, officer or voter, who has no aims 
for complete righteousness, for a beautiful national and 
domestic life, and for economic prosperity for all is mor- 
ally a criminal. 

From these moral laws of the State, there follow two for 
the individual as a citizen. Of these, the first is the obli- 
gation of the able and right-minded citizen to seek office 
and serve in it unmindful of his private interests. /// a 

1 Jesus, Luke, Gospel, xii, 48. " And to whom men have committed 
much, of him they will ask the more." 

2 " Civilized mankind are aware of the changes taking place in their 
social condition and do consciously and deliberately take measures for its 
improvement. This consciousness of a corporate existence and of the 
power to direct social progress is a new force in human destiny." Cairnes, 
Fortnightly Review, January, 1875, p. 71. 



296 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

democracy, no man ca7i be a good ma?i who is not ready to 
be a public man. This is a hard doctrine. No other can 
preserve the Republic. It maybe that no other can now 
redeem the Republic, which requires the best of us all. 

The second moral law for the citizen is never to desire 
the government to serve his private interests, whether 
with or without detriment to others.^ This law involves- 
the most far-reaching and the most searching criticisms 
of things as they are. 

There are moral laws of the School, whose business it 
is, as Spencer said, to "prepare for complete living." 
Knowing well that they are making now and have made 
in the past no effort to prepare all youth for complete 
living, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses have always 
regarded this ideal as academic rather than practical, as 
intellectual rather than moral. The School has been 
2.cnl de sacT2X\iQ.x than a highroad. Too many of its births 
are abortive, still-born. 

The first moral law of the School is to prepare all, 
without exception, for the largest life in the greatest 
variety of activities, subject only to the limitations of 
each in ability, in character, and in energy. This will be 
a life of action, for the philosophy yet to be developed 
from the aphorism, "I act, that is, I am," will yet exceed 
in mass and in force all the philosophy from the aphorism 
of Descartes, " I think, therefore I am." 

The worst deficiency of the School is its renunciation of duty 
and responsibility in respect to all matters that concern Mar- 
riage, Family, and Home. This renunciation is seen in the 
almost universal willingness of schoolmasters to graduate boys 
and girls with diplomas signifying preparation for life (or at 
least supposed so to signify) at the close of grammar-school 
courses at fifteen years of age. Still worse is the leaving of 
school, often, be it said with sorrow and shame, by the encour- 
agement of principals and teachers, at the age of fourteen or 

^ Seelye, Hickok, Moral Science, chapter \x,fassim. 



MORALITY 297 

fifteen from sixth, fifth, even fourth and third-year grades, "to 
go to work." Children who leave school so young, so imma- 
ture, so ignorant, often already so discouraged with life, fur- 
nish the recruits for those pitiful companies of the envious 
victims of human nature in civilization, — street-walkers, har- 
lots, gamins, hoboes, petty thieves, holdup men, — most of 
whom are under twenty years of age. There are not many of 
these ? Their influence is negligible ? There are more of them 
in every great city than of ministers, lawyers, physicians, and 
teachers combined. They "must live," and they do live, 
— short lives, it is true, but lives perilously infectious. 
Visit the police courts, and learn the truth about the 
married lives of the wretched. Visit the homes for " fallen 
women," most of whom are but girls who should bfe still at 
school. Visit the slums and the cheaper theatres on Saturday 
evenings ; and think better of humanity, which endures so 
much of evil, of pain, and of ecstasy, and yet persists in life.-^ 

And remember that all these men and women, boys and 
girls were born to the common heritage of knowledge, of cul- 
ture, of home, and of freedom. Deprived of that heritage, 
sometimes themselves wantonly wasting it, they must live for 
simply the necessity of living, moment by moment, — aban- 
doned to the appetites, hunger, warmth, desire, the delight of 
the eye, the pride of life. 

They are graduated from the middle grammar grades to the 
factory, store, street, dance-hall, saloon, den, jail, and grave- 
yard. And priest and Levite and I pass by on the other side.^ 
The school has failed to educate us as well as them. 

A second moral law^ of the School is to employ teachers 
competent to interpret life in all its phases. " No stream 
can rise higher than its source." 

A third moral law is to demand and to enforce ade- 
quate support for itself. Any other course is hypocrisy.^ 
The present situation in which the average teacher is 

1 The reaction from all this is reflected in the novels of the times : e. g. 
Tolstoi, Resurrection ; Henry, The Unwritten Law. 

2 Jesus, Luke, Gospel, x, 30. 

3 Chancellor, Our Schools, chapters xiv, xv, and xvi. 



298 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

a girl, looking to marriage for escape and burdening her 
relatives for at least a part of her support, is an histor- 
ical and an economic absurdity. 

A fourth moral law is to regard its own rights to equal- 
ity with every other social institution. It must insist 
upon service by an independent profession, exercising 
entire control in it. Under lay domination, the public 
school at least, if not also the private and the endowed, 
is only a pseudo-school. In respect to education, every 
person who is not an educator, formally recognized as 
such by other educators, is a layman. 

There is a moral law for the educator, flowing out of 
his relation to the School ; and this moral law requires 
him to live like a man in the world of men. The exceed- 
ins: deference of schoolmen and schoolwomen to their 
political superiors, and sometimes even to parents, is 
treachery to the cause of education, betrayal of the rights 
of children and youth, confession of the untruth of the 
claim of fitness to prepare the young for life. 

So varied is culture, so numerous are the cultures, that 
it is not easy to discern the moral law therein.^ Culture, 
Philosophy, whatever we call the s^immum of human 
knowledge, — all sciences and arts, the science of sci- 
ences, and the art of arts, — affords, has always afforded, 
and will always afford the supreme problems to the 
supreme intellects. Were the problems ever solved, new 
ones would be presented ; hitherto these supreme pro- 
blems have not been solved. 

There are, however, discernible moral laws for Culture 
as an institution and for cultured men and women. 

The first of these laws is to preserve the true, the 
good, and the beautiful. In whatever form Culture mani- 
fests itself, the law holds : whether the form be the Uni- 
versity, the Drama, Literature, Art, or Music. Obedience 
to the law requires not only intelligence and good faith, 

1 Carlyle, Sartor Re sarins : "The Everlasting Aye." 



MORALITY 299 

qualities common among the cultured, but also courage 
and patience and self-denial, elemental qualities that 
Culture seems to neglect, sometimes even to eradicate.^ 
Culture shrinks from battle. It has grown refined 
and suffers pain from the din and the flame, the pain 
and the blood of conflict. Yet the good, the true, and 
the beautiful can be preserved in an ignorant and wicked 
world, and have been preserved, only by the self-denial, 
the patience, and the courage of the cultured. In truth, 
that is not true culture which is not able to attack 
whatever is false, evil, or hideous, and anxious to 
defend whatever is true, good, or beautiful. In respect 
to morality, Culture is self-containing. It is not a goal, 
but a course upon which mankind goes forward to the 
completeness designed for us by the Creator. 

A second moral law for Culture is to seek these 
excellent things everywhere and always, and gladly to 
recognize them. This is a hard saying : Truth is often 
destructive of much that hitherto has passed for Culture. 
It is often unpleasant to champion the new.^ Beauty is 
often found where Culture is least inclined to look for 
it. And Goodness may appear anywhere, — not the 
goodness, it is true, always of the great but often of the 
little things of life. In democracy. Culture must walk 
not only where the rich and the powerful and the learned 
resort, but also by the countryside and in the city slum. 
Cultitre must go wherever men are ; it is not only to be 
sought, it must itself seek. 

A third moral law of Culture is to give itself freely 

1 I have examined book on book dealing with ethics and morals. I have 
yet to discover one that tells the truth that courage is the first, the basic, 
the absolutely essential, and the only essential, virtue. 

2 Cf. " Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, 
and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. /Rejoice, 
and be exceeding gladr Jesus, Matthew, Gospel, v, 11, 12. Common and 
virulent abuse test and witness the only real courage. Men speak well 
only of '• the false prophets." 



300 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

and commonly, to spend and to be spent in the cause of 
humanity. Whatever it gathers, it must spread. And in 
the modern mind only that Culture is Godlike which, 
like God the Giver, loseth its own life, careless whether it 
may ever find the life again. 

The University exists not for itself, but for the Truth ; and 
for the Truth only because man needs truth. Whatever truth 
the University knows it must dispense as truly as possible. 
Literature is under the same law. In the ideal State, there- 
fore, all Religion, all Art, all Science, all Drama, all News, 
all Literature, all Music will be as free as the highroad, the 
elementary school, the mother's care, and the air itself now are. 

" That day, how it shines afar ! " 

But the highway could not be made free until the men who 
traveled it had learned to go about peacefully and orderly, 
until they were worthy of its freedom and fit for its society.^ 

Culture must be faithful to its trust, catholic in its 
taste, and generous in its spirit ; and it must be more. 
It must be patient with ignorance and with weakness, 
sympathetic with every manner of inferiority, whether 
of will or of feeling, of intellect or of opportunity, and 
urgent only of that which is fit and right in the pre- 
mises. Upon this high range of human power and skill 
and feeling, Culture must walk discreet as well as right- 
eous, kind as well as just, not condescending and yet not 
equal ; for there is no unkindness more harsh than that 
which demands of the less what only the greater can 
perform. 

It is a moral law for Culture to be charitable ; more- 
over, it is a graceless spectacle for Culture to appear 
wanting in charity. We expect of Culture every charm, 
as we expect the diamond to be flawless in its substance 

1 Similarly, the railroad — the modern highway — cannot be made free 
until men are fit to travel freely upon it. 



MORALITY 301 

and form, and the rose to be perfect in its fragrance and 
beauty. For the man or woman of true culture knows 
how infinite the world is, how great and beneficent was 
that series of good fortunes by which even his or her 
little culture has been made possible, how every moment 
spent upon this or that truth has been taken away from 
all other truth, and how frail is the hold of the mind 
upon its treasures. There are never two persons of like 
or equal culture in all the world, nor ever have been. 
Men and women of culture stand upon the outermost 
circumference of the sphere of humanity, to whose cen- 
tre the ignorant and the mediocre must cling. They are 
like plateaus or mountain peaks thrust into the blue, — 
radiations tending ever to greater remoteness from com- 
mon human lives. Moreover, their bases are the rock of 
this same humanity by which they are supported. In the 
very nature of culture, it is economically parasitic, based 
upon substance. The man of culture cannot eat bread 
in the sweat of his own brow. 

Consider that high mountain. First to catch the sunrise 
of the new day, it is last to reflect the sunset of the old day. 
It rises firm and solid, high into the blue of heaven. Its 
base is skirted by pleasant valleys, its sides are green with 
forests, upon its top lies the white snow, while around it flock 
the gleaming clouds. Beneath it is the mighty earth, with its 
rock crust and white-hot core, rotating on its axis, revolving 
in its planetary course, whirling with all the rest of the solar 
system upon its path through this special universe. The 
mountain seems so strong that we imagine it eternal. And 
yet we know that in truth there are no " everlasting hills." 
Wind, rain, ice, faulting, compression are reducing its mass 
and lowering it to the common flat ; and the end is certain. 
To-day the mountain stands, symbol of the majesty of God, 
expressing the laws by which He manifests Nature, laws of 
gravitation, of centrifugal and centripetal forces, of atomic 
valence and molecular cohesion, of heat, of electricity, of 
light, of vibrations, of periodicity, of sound, of all manner 



302 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

of attractions and repulsions, because of which the mountain 
with its snows and rains and clouds, with its now sun-kissed, 
now starlit, now cloud-crowned head, is. Destroy one of these 
laws, and the beneficent, solid, glorious mountain is not. 

So with Culture. Take from it the love of Truth or the 
sense of Beauty or devotion to the Good or sympathy with 
Mankind, and the culture is an illusion, a fog, a miasma. 

There are moral laws of Occupation, which is the 
mode of the industrial arts ; that is, Culture in the con- 
crete ; objective or real Culture. The distinction be- 
tween Art (the fine arts) and industrial culture is not 
that Art is for Art's sake while Occupation is mediate 
that Life may be, for Art is no true end in itself, but 
serves to perfect Humanity ; nor is the distinction in 
the motive, for Art may be as self-centred or as practical 
as Occupation : but the distinction is that Art (or any 
other mode of pure Culture) is careful only of the spirit 
and is careless of the material, while Occupation must 
consider the material, the substance. Michael Angelo 
may be architect and painter and sculptor, for he is an 
artist ; but the masons must build St. Peter's of stone 
of right quality and carefully cut to pattern. The artist 
fixes his eye on the design, the artisan his on the mate- 
rial. The modern architect-engineer has a vision of the 
building that is to be ; but within the limits of the ma- 
terials chosen, steel, brick, concrete, stone, terra-cotta, 
wood, its form may be whatever he chooses. Not so the 
workmen, for they are not the masters but the slaves of 
the form. The poet may sing his thoughts in ode or 
sonnet or ballad or lyric ; but the typesetter must pre- 
sent his words exactly in the literal types. 

The world of Culture is a world of free men, the 
world of Occupation is a world of servants. 

The first moral law of Occupation is that it must 
support the worker and all his natural dependents. Other- 
wise, it is no true occupation, but a cheat and a snare and 



MORALITY 303 

a torment, which betrays its victim and draws society 
to ruin. Because this is the moral law and for no other 
reason whatsoever, for this law is wholly sufficient and 
absolutely imperative. Society in its organized and dom- 
inant form of the State undertakes to regulate wages. 
Here all the political ecomony of laissez faire, with its 
world partly God's, partly the Devil's, the political econ- 
omy not of true wealth but of property-wealth, utterly 
breaks down, because it denies sound morals. The 
laborer must live by his work, he and his sick, his weak, 
his aged, his little ones. Why.? Because God has con- 
structed humanity in a fashion that requires care of 
infants that civilization may endure, care of the young 
and the weak that man may be tender-hearted, care of 
the aged that he may be just and grateful, care of the 
strong that his strength be not used for his own destruc- 
tion. Work without adequate wages for all these objects 
of human necessity and affection is work that destroys 
the race, is work against the will of God, whose end is 
to establish and to perfect humanity. 

" Then Christ sought out an artisan, 
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man, 
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin 
Pushed from her faintly want and sin. 

" These set He in the midst of them, 
And as they drew back their garment-hem, 
For fear of defilement, ' Lo, here,' said He, 

' The images ye have made of Me.' " ^ 

What are we going to do about it .? First, recognize it, 
diagnose it. There is no cure until the disease is known. 
This is a disease of civilization. What has education 
to do with this .? Who does not understand the proper 
relation of education to civilization, does not yet under- 

1 Lowell, A Parable. 



304 THE EVIDENCES OP^ EDUCATION 

stand what education in America is and what we as 
Americans have undertaken. 

A second moral law of Occupation is that it should 
include all who are capable of its labor without injury 
to themselves, but not capable of rendering any higher 
service to society. Every one with the power to do im- 
mediately useful work should be required to do it, unless 
he is actually doing or is being fitted to do work that is 
or will be more useful work than Occupation affords. The 
leisure class must be composed exclusively of persons 
who as exponents of Culture are more useful to human- 
ity than they would be as workers by Occupation. The 
working classes must be composed exclusively of those 
well able to work and not able to do anything better. 

The corollary of this moral law is that no persons phys- 
ically or psychically unable to work without detriment to 
themselves should work. The spectacle of pregnant and 
nursing mothers, of consumptives and other invalids, of half- 
grown girls and boys, even of baby children, at work in mines 
or mills or factories or stores is an offense against conscience 
as well as against common sense. ^ It may be " Business " ; 
but so may war and pestilence, crime, graft, and vice be 
" Business." That reconstruction of society, that " industrial 
revolution," ^ which has borne the fruits of disintegrated 
home and family, government for the merchant, religion and 
culture for persons of leisure and wealth, education for prac- 
tical life, has itself been brought to bar for judgment and 
sentence. It has filled the world with goods, but for whom ? 

1 " * True,' say the children, * it may happen 
That we die before our time : 
Little Alice died last year ; her grave is shapen 

Like a snowball in the rime. 
We looked into the pit prepared to take her : 

Was no room for any work in the close clay : 
From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her, 
Crying, " Get up, little Alice ! it is day." ' " 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, T/ie Cry of the Children. 
2 Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution ; Ruskin, Fors Clavigera. 



MORALITY 305 

The year 1660 saw the end of feudalism, the year 1776 saw 
the rise of republicanism ; but by 1830 this republicanism, 
which was in substance a democracy, with an aristocratic 
overtone, a representative democracy, began to be subverted 
by a new feudalism more subtle, less responsible than the 
old. Therefore, we have a democracy with a plutocratic over- 
tone and a demagogic undertone : and what is that sad 
music as of breakers so far away ? Is the wind rising ? Is 
there thundering in the air? Is the good ship driving into 
storm ? 

A second corollary of this law is that none should work 
overtime, beyond his strength, so long as to exclude the 
possibiUty of living the present life of civilized society. Even 
the workingman is clearly entitled to some leisure. It may be 
true that he cannot for a year or for five years at a stretch 
produce as much when working eight or six hours a day as 
he could when working twelve or fourteen hours a day. It 
may be inconvenient for commercial and industrial enterprises 
to give every worker a day and a half in every seven for rest 
and recreation. It may be true that the man who works eight 
hours a day and five days in the week will spend much of his 
time and of his money in the " saloon," that bugbear of philan- 
thropic business men, who do "not believe in the eight-hour 
day " and in the Saturday half-holiday.^ 

A third moral law of Occupation is that its product 
shall never be harmful to humanity. This is an applica- 
tion of that fundamental law of righteousness, — to do 
nothing injurious to one's self or to others. Law-honesty 
may not run pari passu with real honesty ; but to adul- 
terate food is none the less vicious. Fornication may be 
practiced without prejudice among certain classes, and 
is forgivable in the notion of certain churches ; but as 
a mode of livelihood or of amusement, it is as vicious 

1 In the reaction against what I know of too much work, I will not find 
fault with the middle-aged workingman who visits the saloon in the even- 
ing, or even the young man or woman who goes to the " cheap theatre " 
or to the music- or dance-hall. Cf. Patten, New Basis of Civilizatiotiy 
chapter vii. 



3o6 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

to-day as it was when God wiped out whole peoples that 
practiced it. 

This moral law of Occupation affords a simple yet 
entirely convincing test of " what one has a right to do 
for money." Applied, it would revolutionize the prac- 
tices of .the ministry, the law, medicine, education, gov- 
ernment, manufacture, commerce, marriage, and indeed 
what not ? Religious hypocrites for hire, legal tricksters 
and shysters, medical quacks, uneducated educators, legis- 
lators on behalf of "special interests," makers and traders 
in the "just-as-good " and "harmless adulterants," gamb- 
ling of whatever kind, marriages for money or for sup- 
port, and everything else that tends to debase mankind, 
would disappear ; therefore, this cannot yet be, for the 
end apparently is not yet in view. 

A fourth moral law of Occupation is to improve both 
the art itself and the artisan. The machine that conquers 
work is a benefaction to mankind. 

A corollary of this law is almost as important as the law 
itself. Wanting a universal organization, Occupation, both as 
Employer and as Employed, has appealed often to Government 
for relief when machinery has displaced laborers and upon 
many other occasions. Occupation must organize in order 
to set its artisans and other workers right in the world as con- 
ditions change.^ 

For the worker in Occupation, there is the law to deal 
honestly with one's self and with the world. The product 
and the service for one's own sake and for the sake of 
humanity must be the best of which one is capable under 
the circumstances. This, too, is revolution. If ever}'' 
workman were intelligent and honest and as efficient as 
Nature and School have permitted, Death would harvest 
few before they had reached "man's allotted span," 
whatever that is. 

* Webb, Industrial Democracy. 



MORALITY 307 

For the Professions, which are higher than the Occupations 
and founded on them, which are, indeed, useful modes of 
Culture rather than distinct modes of human activity, though 
they are modes of applying special knowledge in the service 
of humanity, there is the distinct moral law that the professor 
should serve all the needy irrespective of compensation, 
honorarium, or other reward. 

Business has many meanings. In its narrowest sense, ac- 
cording to Webster, it means "traffic," "buying and selling," 
" financial dealings." I use it in the slightly broader sense of 
directing occupations, exchanging goods, employing services 
for economic ends. Among business men, I include employ- 
ing manufacturers, merchants, bankers, brokers, contractors, 
agents, overseers, transportation managers, and others simi- 
larly engaged. 

In the year 1776, nine tenths of Americans were 
farmers.^ The number of business men was very small. 
Even of these, most were partly farmers and mechanics. 
There were some business men in England, but its repu- 
tation as "a nation of traders and shopkeepers " was not 
yet established. A study of the census of 1900 for the 
United States fails to reveal what we desire to know. 
There were merchants and dealers (wholesale), rnale 
42,032, female 261 ; (retail), male 756,802, female 34,084 ; 
bankers and brokers, male 72,984, female 293 ; officials 
of banks and companies, male 72,801, female 1271. But 
we are at a loss to discover how many employing farmers 
there were ; how many of the foregoing merchants were 
their own bookkeepers and salesmen ; how many con- 
tractors there were in the building trades ; how many 
employing manufacturers; in short, how many men and 
women in "gainful occupations" were securing their 
gains from products of their own hands, and how many 
by trading in the products of others. It may be Utopian 
to expect a census that will adopt philosophical or even 

V Schouler, Americans 0/ lyyO. 



3o8 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

economic distinctions, and cease to call both the man 
who lays brick and stone and the man who employs such 
brick- and stone-layers "masons." The man who cuts 
diamonds and the man who buys and sells cut diamonds 
view life from different points. He who farms twenty 
acres and he who farms twenty thousand differ as the 
laborer in an industry and the manager of a business 
must inevitably differ. Their differences are many. The 
important difference for this discussion is that the pri- 
mary interest of the man of art, whether fine or indus- 
trial, is in the work itself, the product, the service, while 
the primary interest of the business man is in what he or 
his employers or his stockholders will get out of it, in 
the profits, in the results to property. 

In 1893, at Interlaken, in a little wood-carving shop, I saw 
a little carven bear. The price was five francs. I offered 
four. After some parley, the carver said, " Oh, well, I can 
make another," and sold the art-treasure. He was an artist. 
In that same year at Pisa, in a store, I saw small replicas 
of the Leaning Tower at four lire each. I offered seven lire for 
two. " No, signore," said the proprietor, " the price of two 
towers is ten lire." " Why ? " I asked. " If you can buy two, 
you must be rich," answered the business man. 

The argument is not that the small farmer may not be also 
a good business man. He may be also a good politician. It 
is that, as compared with the "bonanza farmer," he is not 
primarily a farmer for the profits of " the farming business." 

It is in fact easy to transform any profession or art or trade 
(occupation) into a business ; and to do so is one of the 
temptations that beset mankind. The physician who betrays 
medicine from the art of healing into the business of get- 
ting money from incurably or disgracefully sick persons, the 
woman who marries for money, the author who writes books 
to sell, and others like them, pervert art from its purposes 
and strike at the heart of civil society. 

The characteristic purpose of Business, as defined and 



MORALITY 309 

used in this text, is without labor or value to make some- 
thing into more, which is in reality to get something for 
nothing. Of Business, used in this sense, some typical 
operations are these : to buy at a price and '' to hold for 
a rise," then by selling ''to make a profit;" to force 
owners to make sales to their disadvantage ; to mono- 
polize or " corner " properties so as to force purchasers to 
buy "at artificial prices; " to defraud the general public, 
that is, one's fellow men, by bribing or bulldozing their 
representatives in government or by betraying the public 
through making its own heads, employers, or attorneys 
the political representatives; to muzzle the press; in its 
own interest, to publish statements not true or to sup- 
press true statements ; to enforce contracts to their limit 
when favorable, and to scant them to the limit when 
unfavorable. " The stock market is pure business, and 
no sentiment," is a common saying. 

It is Business that has given basis to the philosophy of 
Nietzsche. Mankind may be divided into two kinds : masters 
and servants. The world exists for the profit of the masters. 
To the consistent exponent of Business the end of life is gain. 
Business is not too serious in its view of life, but too intent 
in its purpose to say, " Eat, drink, for to-morrow we die." 
But it does say, and act accordingly, " I will tear down my 
barns and build greater." Given free rein, Business would 
wreck mankind immediately, for it would destroy every form 
of Society. 

Business must not be confused with transportation of 
goods. This is a service that actually adds value to the goods. 
The service requires fabor and employs capital often at many 
points. Wholesalers and retailers (the " middlemen " between 
producers and consumers) must move the goods from mine, 
mill, warehouse, store, to the place of consumption. 

The artificiality of business becomes apparent when the 
canvassing agent is considered. Clearly he adds nothing 
to the value of the goods, though he must be paid out of the 
price. 



3IO THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

War is without morals. What are the morals of Busi- 
ness as defined here? War is a relation, an anti-relation, 
a struggle between assailant and assaulted. Business is 
a struggle between seller and buyer. The "ethics" of 
selling involve getting the highest possible price for the 
article ; of buying, getting the article at the lowest pos- 
sible price. To be sure, when one expects to go on sell- 
ing the same kind of article for years to come, it " pays " 
to be " honest," that is, to represent the goods as they 
are. But this is the "honesty" of "policy," not of 
morality. 

There are many evidences that Business is a Warfare 
tempered by truces : only a few of these evidences may 
be outlined. To prevent competition from running into 
cut-throat anarchy, rival sellers of similar goods form 
pools or consolidate into syndicates, corporations, or 
"trusts," while rival sellers of labor form unions and 
federations. "Ethics" require that the merchants shall 
keep honor with one another unless a very great profit is 
certain to follow withdrawal from the agreement, and 
that the laborers shall stick together and not " scab " in 
time of trouble. The same "ethics" permit strikes, boy- 
cotts, when laborers are dissatisfied, and lockouts when 
the employers are dissatisfied. . It is conventional "ethics" 
to bribe an opponent when bribery is cheaper than mak- 
ing war upon him. 

There are, no doubt, tens of thousands of men who 
wish that Business could become moral, even religious 
and philanthropic, in its character. And there are also 
many instances when Business actually serves the inter- 
ests of morality and even of charity. But consider two of 
the fundamental tenets of morality, — to tell the truth 
and to keep one's promises, — and imagine the effect 
upon Business of obeying these principles in letter and 
in spirit! What becomes of the doctrine of a "fair 
profit" ."* Does it include anything more than fair wages 



MORALITY 311 

for the service rendered and repayment of expenses 
actually incurred ? On this basis would any man " earn " 
a million dollars by a deal ? What becomes of the law- 
suits for broken contracts that crowd the calendars of 
the courts ? Do not the records of these courts bear 
witness to the fact that they are the umpires, referees, 
and judges in a warfare regulated but not suppressed 
by civilized society ? Is not the lawyer a champion 
for an otherwise hapless wight in a jousting match or 
a tournament ? The very penalty for non-performance, 
so frequently set forth in contract, bears witness to 
the fact that in Business we expect promises to be 
broken. 

The man who tells the truth in Business, who gives 
full value (literally so) for value received, and who keeps 
his promises, — who, in other words, deals with others 
as he would prefer them to deal with him, — has re- 
nounced Business. Such a man does not consider what 
he can get and then proceed to get all that he can for a 
product or a service, but considers only what the product 
or service has actually cost him in goods and time; in 
short he is working for a livelihood, and not for a fortune. 
This is not Business as here defined. This man must be 
an artist, a professor, a servant, an artisan, a mechanic, 
or some other kind of person who lives to do good 
work and who works to live; but he is no "business 
man." The aim of the business man is to get more of 
the wealth of *' the other fellow " than he gives in return : 
he adds to his own property if he can, and he does not 
care whether or not he adds to the sum of the world's 
wealth or happiness.^ His own life is not an art in its 
aims or in its acts or in itself ; but it is a means to get 
goods, to get ever more and, more property. 

There are many other relations than those of the for- 
mal social institutions and of the social struggles. These 

1 Ruskin, 



312 THE EVIDENCES OF EDUCATION 

Other relations have never been classified, but are miscel- 
laneous. We may combine them in the term General 
Society, which has clear and explicit moral principles, 
needing no exposition. 

Social morality requires one to tell the truth unless 
that hurts, and even when it hurts, provided the case re- 
quires it, — that is, when the truth will do more good than 
harm. It requires keeping one's promises and appoint- 
ments unless released. It requires the consideration for 
others, exemplified by such virtues as punctuality, polite- 
ness, and gentleness. It requires, therefore, decency of 
attire, courtesy by the strong to the weak, promising no 
more than one can perform, and raising no false expecta- 
tions. It requires gratitude, resistance to evils suffered 
by or threatened against the weak, magnanimity to en- 
emies, indifference to insults, to false accusations, and to 
backbitings, and a desire to deal justly, mercifully, chari- 
tably, with all men, good and bad. It requires full per- 
formance of every obligation in Church and State and 
in every other social institution. 

That peculiar community known as Society and familiar in 
every part of the world does not manifest all these moral 
principles. Whether in China or in Boston, in Vienna or 'in 
St. Louis, Society worships success, and after a generation 
or two ignores the methods. It has one additional require- 
ment, grace — or at least graciousness. To be successful and 
to have manners — such as affability, cordiality, bodily grace, 
and acquaintance with " the world " — is to have the keys to 
this Society. Though it knows thoroughly and appreciatively 
nothing, — neither Art nor Music, neither Drama nor Philo- 
sophy, not even War or Business, — Society is an aesthetic 
world-by-itself, not lightly to be regarded by actors in, or by 
students of, the various real worlds of men. 

How shall education induct the youth into such a great 
and complex body of morals as this discussion suggests ? 



MORALITY 313 

It has not yet seriously attempted the task. Only one so 
informed as to society may safely be trusted to take his 
conscience as his king.^ 



1 " A creed is a rod, 

And a crown is of night 



But this thing is God ; — 

To be man with thy might, — 

To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, 

And live out thy life as the light." 

Swinburne, " Hertha," Songs before Sunrise. 



PART FOUR 

THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

The sheer purpose to see things as they are, the love of our 
neighbor, the impulses to action, help, and beneficence, the desires 
for removing human confusion and for diminishing human misery, 
the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we 
found it, the recognition that to be salutary and stable every action 
and every institution must be based upon reason and maintained 
by method, and the persistent sense of duty constitute culture, 
which seeks to make the best that is known and thought in the 
world current everywhere. Culture has one great passion, the pas- 
sion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the pas- 
sion for making ihtm prevail. — Matthew Arnold, Culture and 
Anarchy (abridged). 



CHAPTER XIV 

SCIENCE 

"Forward let me still go in my search after truth; and therein let me die." — 
Barneveld, Letter to a Friend, in Life by Motley. 

The greatest intellectual revolution man has yet seen is now slowly taking place by the 
agency of science. — Huxley, Zoology, Lay Sertnons, p. ii8. 

The course of Nature is the art of God. — Young, Night Thoughts, ix. 

Literacy writes and reads various records of fact and 
of opinion. Science discovers facts and exposes false- 
hoods. In respect to Nature, literacy expresses her 
appearances as seen casually, often as seen emotionally, 
by man, expresses her not perfectly, accumulates in 
books what man thinks of her. The burden of the 
thought of man about Nature, real enough perhaps for 
the recorder, but to all others secondary and not pri- 
mary, grows ever heavier upon the shoulders of man. 

Science is the result of the desire of man to know 
facts, to ascend the heights of Truth. For the discovery 
of Truth, for the knowledge of Reality as far as Man can 
know it, he has invented a method called Science. This 
is a method not of strictly universal applicability, but of 
far more general applicability than at first appeared. By 
it, man arranges the Facts and tests such hypotheses as 
may suggest themselves to him when he considers the 
Facts. The hypotheses remain in the domain of Philo- 
sophy, which is a system of generalizations upon general- 
izations, a science of sciences, and belongs, therefore, in 
the field of Literacy. 

The scientific method has constructed a multitude of 
sciences, — to mention a few, botany, biology, zoology, 
anthropology, physiology, chemistry, physics, philology. 



3i8 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

geology, mineralogy, meteorology; and is trying to 
construct many more, — sociology, therapy, hygiene, 
ethnology, somatology, psychology, pathology, economics. 
It undertakes to invade the field of history and to con- 
vert this into a science,^ and has not hesitated to discuss 
religion, sometimes even challenging the reality of faith. 

When we divide all subjects as belonging either to Nature 
or to Man, and therefore as belonging either to Science or to 
Philosophy, we are confronted by Mathematics, which are 
neither inductive and scientific in their nature nor human in 
their interests. We are told that, though essential to his 
success in the struggle with Nature, the Mathematics are 
sciences, and indifferent to the temporal concerns of man, 
because they are the logical, dialectic, intuitional, and 
supreme achievement of his intellect. For the Mathematics 
attain certitude, and all mathematical knowledge is indubit- 
able. Therefore, they constitute abstract or pure Science, 
and contribute a statistical method to Science and a mode 
of quantitative measurement to the qualitative criticisms of 
Philosophy. 

The scientific method begins with a childlike insistence 
upon sight of the thing as it is, and disregard, of every 
opinion concerning it. Science is the second power of that 
activity of intelligence which functions as observation. 
Equally truthful and impartial with the observation must 
be the record of the fact as seen. The method proceeds 
to accumulate, to collate, and to correlate the facts and to 
consider them in their relations. It is, therefore, a method 
of redemption from superstition as well as from ignorance. 
The scientific method is truth itself functioning as desire 
and purpose to learn yet more truth. As such, it requires 
the exercise not only of the reason — that highest mode 
in which the mind of man acts, and which in its insights 
and intuitions seems to act independently of all condi- 

^ Fling, " Historical Synthesis," American Historical Review, October, 
1903. 



SCIENCE 319 

tions — but the exercise also of every other faculty. The 
eradication of superstitions must proceed pari passu et 
aequo gradu with the acquisition of truths, for the mind 
is not a vacuum but a plenum, and is capable only of cor- 
rection and of enlargement, never of reduction. In itself, 
the denunciation of error can produce but one or the 
other of two results, obstinate accentuation of belief in 
the error through reaction against the assault, or con- 
fusion of ideas, unsettlement of opinion, and hopeless- 
ness of ever knowing truth, which is worse. 

Nor may we with propriety too greatly flatter our- 
selves that superstitions are not in course of developing 
or of strengthening in these our own "modern " times. 
A superstition may indeed be an " ancient good " made 
"uncouth "by Time (to use the phrasing of Lowell), a prin- 
ciple grown anachronous, a corpse once living but at last 
putrid in death. For we must not only find new truth but 
reject old truth, not only construct but destroy. Tabula 
the mind never was, but tabula rasa in parts it must be 
in order that new truth may be written upon it. Agnos- 
ticism is the transition from knowledge to yet greater 
and better knowledge. One who is not willing to doubt is 
not yet ready to learn. A world that dares not challenge 
its beliefs thereby certifies that it is superstitious, for 
truth is militant.^ 

Into Nature, its past and its present, into Man as the 
chief product and example of Nature, we inquire to-day 
most anxiously and as scientifically as we know how. In 
this inquiry, we shrink from nothing whatsoever, believ- 
ing that truth only is sacred, believing that truth is 
necessary to human salvation, believing that truth can 
receive no wound save the death-blow of fear for its 
safety. " Defend truth } " said Hegel. " Truth will de- 
fend thee." 

^ The free world challenges by experiment the modern reform. Wundt, 
Human and Animal Psychology, p. 9. 



320 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

A multitude of problems and of questions suggest 
themselves to illustrate the range of this scientific inquiry 
into Nature and human nature to find truth. It is possi- 
ble to transplant the ovaries : consider what questions of 
heredity and of morality this surgical achievement raises. 
Once man knew nothing of race ; then came philology, 
measuring his kinship by language ; now comes somato- 
logy, measuring his kinship by the ratio of length of 
head to breadth. Historical geology reconstructs the 
earth and localizes the subanthropoid upon ancient lit- 
torals of the sea. The brain appears to be a medium to 
register vibrations of thought. Mob sympathy becomes 
intelligible ; and clairvoyance. Said Tolstoi : " The power 
transcending all others, which has influenced individuals 
and peoples since Time began, the power that is the 
convergence of the invisible, intangible spiritual forces of 
all humanity is social opinion." ^ The worm grows by 
visible stages into man. Electricity and steam have made 
the ancient aphorism untrue, *' Government is strongest 
at its centre, weakest upon its periphery; " and democracy 
becomes as practicable for a continent as for a city. 
Radium looks through many forms of matter, and a new 
philosophy is born. In the spectrum, the universe be- 
comes a unity. We measure fatigue by sphygnometry, 
and reconstruct education by anthropometry and by 
psychology. By the quantitative measurements of statis- 
tics, the old political economy fails and the new succeeds. 
Chemistry analyzes foods, and a nation changes its break- 
fasts.^ As a mountaineer ascends the ice cliff, digging 
handhold and foothold anxiously, joyously, each hold 
slowly won but secure, so man ascends the heights of 
perfectness, relying upon ever higher and higher truth. 

For truth, man turns ever more and more to Nature, the 
visible garment of God, as Goethe said ; and God is no 

1 Tolstoi, The Kingdo7n of God, chapter x, 

2 Patten, N'eiv Basis of Civilization, p. 20. 



SCIENCE 321 

hypocrite displaying one thing as truth in Nature and 
another thing as truth in Men. If there is a revealed 
Word, that Word and Nature must, of course, agree. 
There can be no reconciliation between scientific truth 
and religious truth, for there never was nor ever can be 
any disagreement.^ The supposed disagreements were 
all revelations of new truth and exposures of old error. 

Superstitions were respectable in ages when the 
structures of particular societies were too weak safely to 
permit collisions of thought ; but in this age and land, 
when and where society has many different bonds, there 
is no danger but only good in freedom of thought, the 
last, not the first, the highest freedom of man. There- 
fore, he turns to Nature hopefully and continually. 

" For I have learned 
To look on Nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity. 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused. 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. Therefore, am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
And mountains ; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear, — both what they half create 
And what perceive ; well pleased to recognize 
In Nature and the language of the sense. 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse. 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being." 

* White, The Warfare betiveen Science and Theology^ vol. i, p. viii. 



322 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

*' To them, I may have owed another gift, 
Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, 
In which the burden of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened : — that serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections gently lead us on, — 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul, 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things." ^ 

Man as the product of Nature, body evolved, soul, 
too, evolved : is not this better, after all is said, than to 
suppose that each man is a stranger here, an individual 
special creation, homeless ? And does this preclude his 
being an individual creature, proceeding, as Carlyle so 
often said, "from Eternity to Eternity" ? Is there not 
a dignity in this conception of a cosmic life, of a life 
akin to all other creatures, that is unattainable by any 
other philosophy ? 

" Immense have been the preparations for me, 

Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me, 

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, 

For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, 

They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. 

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, 

My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it. 

For it the nebula cohered to an orb, 

The long, slow strata piled to rest it on, 

Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, 

Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it 

with care — 
All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight 

me, 
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul." ^ 

* Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey. 2 Whitman, The Song of Myself. 



SCIENCE 323 

Our hope is that the scientific study of Nature, begun 
in the nineteenth century, may prove to be one of those 
factors for want of which no nation has ever yet solved 
the problem of progress without end, but by the posses- 
sion of which this nation shall so progress. This scien- 
tific study may produce, is, we believe, actually producing, 
results of value in human economy. Man, said Malthus, 
increases in geometric ratio, food in arithmetical ; and, 
Ricardo added, by the law of diminishing returns, food- 
lands certainly reach a point where each laborer begins 
to find his individual return growing smaller. Social 
peace, therefore, multiplies man and thereby brings him 
to starvation. History has disproven this proposition; 
the factor ignored was scientific discovery accompanied 
by technical invention.^ We have learned how to ex- 
haust nitrogen from the air, how to inoculate the soil 
with the microbes of fertility, how to sow, to cultivate, 
and to reap by machinery, how to produce new plants, 
and how to work many other marvels ; and starvation is 
more remote from man to-day than it was a hundred 
years ago, when the "dismal science" first declared its 
prophecy. 

Natural science not only discovers new truth and adds 
to the stock of human knowledge, but manifests a singu- 
lar power in the education and elevation of its students. 
It liberates talents, quickens curiosity, arouses devotion, 
inspires activity, and enlarges sympathy. The serious 
student of Nature seems to be quickened by cosmic 
force, to be brought into the presence of the Maker. 
"Through Nature to God " ^ is a current phrase that 
conveys a truth familiar to the students of science, tech- 
nical as well as speculative, laboratory as well as library. 
Telescope, microscope, telemicrophotoscope, spectro- 
scope, reagent, flux, seismograph, quadrant, vernier, flame, 

1 Ward, Psychic Factors in Civilization, chapters xxvii, xxviii, xxix. 
' Fiske, Through Nature to God, p. 193. 



324 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

furnace ; botanist, biologist, histologist, physicist, chem- 
ist, physician ; tool, medium, worker : all these reveal 
the same truth as do Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, Darwin, 
Wallace, Fiske, that the whole, from ion to universe, from 
star-dust to mind, is the thought of God. John, the re- 
ligious poet, called the thought (the "logos") a person, 
** without whom was not anything made that was made." ^ 
And Dante ^ saw that all Nature is interwoven with the 
love of God. 

It requires but very little philosophy to see that the ques- 
tion whether humanity is to conquer the slow cooling of the 
earth and to last forever, or is to have an end in the flesh 
as it had a beginning, has no relation to the question of find- 
ing God and His truth in Nature, Humanity is no entity, is 
a mere abstraction of thought, a concept, a term. Each indi- 
vidual may be an entity, a reality, an eternally living soul. For 
the individual, this particular Nature, the surrounding world, 
is real : each man in the course of his life may find this 
Nature his Maker and his God. An impermanent world, in- 
habited by a mortal humanity, may afford a sufficiency of 
experience for this period of time for each permanent and 
immortal man. The heavens may be rolled up as a scroll ; 
but the reader may never forget what was written thereon. 
In the long perspective of eternity, evil is not " inchoate 
good," not "good in the making," not even a sacrifice that good 
may come, a temporary scaffolding for the permanent struc- 
ture ; but both good and evil cease to be, our finite judg- 
ments no longer hold, and we are reduced to a proper place 
as creatures who cannot judge.^ Thus good and evil become 
inexplicable, their incidents mere occasions for the exercise 
of our finite powers ; and we are taught " to trust in the 
Lord " and to do always and only that which to us seems 
good. One cannot look upon Nature and remain at peace, 
as one cannot look upon men and human society and remain 

^ John, Gospel, i, 6. 

2 Paradiso, xxxiii, 85. 

^ " I have learned," said Goethe, " quietly to revere the unfathomable." 



SCIENCE 325 

at peace, or find peace, until one sees in all external processes 
the manner in which the Almighty works. And why then 
shall one do that which seems good ? Only because life seeks 
goodness as though it were a positive magnetic pole ; and the 
good promotes life. One who is the parent of ten children, 
another who rears two well, another who educates fifty, others 
who by their products or services feed, clothe, transport, en- 
lighten, heal, amuse, or in any other of familiar uncounted 
ways, direct and indirect, benefit hundreds, perhaps thousands 
of humankind : these all do good because they promote life. 
Therefore, America has done well to regard economic service 
as useful and as honorable as political or cultural.^ 

Consider the varied forms of life in a single foot of 
woodland sod. Spears and roots of grass, weed and 
flower seedlets, worms, insects, seeds and eggs, lives and 
germs of lives visible and invisible, unnumbered and in- 
numerable ! The great tree near by sends tiny rootlets 
into it. On that sod, the bird, the hare, and the snake 
feed. The rain waters it, the air dries it ; the sun warms, 
and the frost chills it. Here work all manner of physical 
forces, — capillary, molecular, atomic, kinetic, chemic. 
Underneath it subsists the planetary mass held in its 
course by sun and stars. This foot of sod, teeming with 
life, has all the interest of the universe ; and, as a part 
of the universe, it has a dignity beyond estimate. 

Thus Science, beginning with facts in the concrete, 
and proceeding through relations and generalizations, 
that involve all history, natural and human, arrives at the 
gateway of Philosophy, 

In this world of God, we may not honorably fasten 
our attention and affection too much upon the various 
sciences of Nature from geology to ecology, or upon the 
fields of investigation as determined by a particular 
instrument, whether telescope or radium tube, or upon 
any particular method, historical, laboratory, comparative, 

^ Miinsterberg, The Americans^ chapters xi, xil 



326 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

inductive, or any other ; Nature is more than Science, 
and the whole is far more worthy of our interest than 
any part. Moreover, Nature is the real teacher ; and, when 
the soul is responsive, offers lessons of incalculable value. 

" And Nature, the old nurse, took 
The child upon her knee, 
Saying : ' Here is a story-book 
Thy Father has written for thee.' " ^ 

Poets and naturalists have conspired with the hearts 
of men, have indeed expressed the innermost heart of 
man, by expounding and by exemplifying the lessons of 
Nature. In the education of the individual man, there is 
always a development that appears to be a revival of the 
ancient familiarity with Nature. But the appearance is 
far from the reality. By science, by literature, by the 
summer camp in the woods or upon the shore of ocean, 
we do not go "back to Nature." Knowledge builds in 
things visible the world of the city and builds in the 
invisible mind the world of Nature. The primitive sav- 
age of the fields and woods could not know or love 
Nature : the fear of the mysterious events and processes 
of the external world consumed him. Winters, storms, 
drouths, nights, wild beasts, reptiles, insects, diseases, acci- 
dents, deaths, births, wars, — an anarchy of circumstances 
not understood or misunderstood, — filled and terrorized 
his soul.^ All the glory of life has increased as man has 
removed from his starting-point to his goal, from his 
origin to his destiny : all the glory, — freedom, beauty, 

^ Longfellow, To Agassiz. 

2 A comparison of the Nature-fiction — e. g. De Foe's Robinson 
Crusoe, Weyman's Story of Ab, London's Before Adam — with the 
Nature-books of Thompson-Seton, Long, and their school, and with the 
Nature-bibles, — Hall's Adolescence, Darwin's Origin of Species and De- 
scent of Man, Drummond's Ascent of Man, — reveals vividly the desire 
of man to uncover the depths whence he came and the road by which he 
came. 



SCIENCE 327 

wisdom, righteousness, love of Nature. To the man who 
has won power from struggle, patience from pain, straight- 
forwardness from difficulty, each virtue from evil over- 
come, each knowledge from darkness lighted, the en- 
trance into Nature is an exceeding, an intoxicating joy. 
Pictures of sky and hill, of river and plain, of marsh and 
sea, of mountain and forest, of stars and sun, of night 
and twilight, of snow and rain: sounds of **the little 
green leaves," ' songs of birds, plashing waves, roaring 
tempests, all manner of voices : insights and lessons'': 
for these he goes into the open country not yet noisome 
with men, and of these he composes reverie and dream 
while life lasts.2 The history of Nature fascinates him 
with its extinct animals, its changed seasons and climates, 
its human civilizations now vanished away, its evolution 
out of the primordial disorder, if such thing ever were. 
Cosmos out of Chaos ? Never. A universe out of no- 
thing.? Never. A surprising reconciliation grows in his 
soul. What has made me must be like me and must 
make all things like me. This lesson comes late. The 
great throng of Nature-lovers belong to our own times ; 
the names of Thoreau, Jefferies, Wordsworth, Bryant,' 
Whitman, Tennyson, Lanier, lighten our age with the 
halo of glowing reverence for the works of God. 

'* Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes, 
Or any searcher know by mortal mind ? 
Veil after veil will lift — but there must be 
Veil upon veil behind. 

" Stars sweep and question not. This is enough, 
That life and death and joy and woe abide ; ' 
And cause and sequence and the course of time 
And Being's ceaseless tide." ^ 

^ Lanier, Sunrise. 2 jefferies, S^orjy of My Heart. 

3 Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia. 



CHAPTER XV 

ART 

A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things. — Jesus, 
Matthew, Gospel, xii, 35. Cf. Luke, Gospel, vi, 45. 

In our heart of hearts, we are well assured that the truth that has made us free will in 
the end make us glad also. — Felix Adler, A Religion based ok Ethics, p. 34. 

Art consists in this, that one person consciously, by certain external signs, — move- 
ments, lines, colors, sounds, images, words, — so conveys to others feelings that he has 
experienced that they are affected by these feelings and live them over m themselves. — 
Tolstoi, What is Art? p. 74 (Johnston, translator). 

The ideals of Education, which is the proper concern of 
the School, are Intelligence, Efficiency, and Morality, — 
developed processes of intellection, conation, and emo- 
tion. The ideals of Culture, which is the proper concern 
of the University, are Science, Art, and Philosophy, — 
perfected processes of intellection, conation, and emo- 
tion. Thus by Education and by Culture, one may arrive 
at self-understanding and world-understanding. But one 
may achieve this end only by the long way of the mediate 
processes. One should know, do, judge ; out of the know- 
ledge let wisdom arise ; out of the doing, art ; out of the 
moral judging, a philosophy of conduct. 

Even observation and literacy, the first and yet least 
of the ideals of education, can never be perfectly achieved. 
No man lives who can see all the truth and understand the 
written thought of every other man, living or dead, and 
express every thought of his own. He who studies Sci- 
ence seriously and continuously at last knows how futile 
all his study is ; the unknown is so vast as to be essen- 
tially unknowable. Yet men have dreamed of becoming 
complete scholars and synthetic speculative scientists. 
Neither Von Ranke nor Lord Acton by long lives of 



ART 329 

prodigious industry, supported by extraordinary talents, 
could master even all history, not to say all other fields 
of hurnan literary expression.^ Spencer essayed to master 
the meaning and details of all the sciences; but his phil- 
osophy, despite its mechanical and rational excellencies, 
fails as a science of sciences. True philosophy recognizes 
such an undertaking as literally " beyond reason." 

Still more daring would he be who in this modern age 
should undertake the mastery of all the arts, for though 
in its essence Science is one, the arts are many. Michael 
Angelo, indeed, was painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and 
singer. 2 We meet men and women to-day who play the 
piano and the violin, write verse and prose, sing, and paint. 
The polyglot who is eagerly attacking his thirteenth or 
thirtieth language has his counterpart in the artist who 
in clay, oil, water-color, bronze, stone, brick, in tone of 
flute, cornet, viol, organ, by essay, poem, narrative, argu- 
ment, seeks to express his thought in mode or form of 
beauty. Such universal artistry is a far more difficult 
enterprise than universal literacy. Artistry involves 
concepts of beauty, motor-efficiency, and that vigorous 
integrity of soul which we call conscience. To perceive 
beauty and to image it in the mind, to desire to make the 
image real in the world and to reduce hand and eye and 
brain, muscle, nerve, will itself, to successful obedience 
to the vision, and to think, to feel, and to perform 
everything in sweet harmony^ with genuine morality 
are the obligations, the life-long, insistent obligations 

^ The curious should read the notes to Acton's brief essay, The Sttidy 
of History^ and discover how vast his reading was. 

2 Raphael, dying at thirty-seven, had compassed an immense range and 
variety of subjects and technical methods. 

3 As a comparatively trivial instance of perfect artistry notice the phrase 
of Milton, — "the quiet and still air of delightful studies," {Reason of 
Church Government, Introduction, book i.) A lesser artist would have 
fallen into verse and have written " still and quiet air," but Milton saw the 
true climax from quiet to still. 



330 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

of the artist. Moreover, to each particular art are its 
peculiar modes and forms of beauty and its peculiar 
technical requirements of the human body. Few, there- 
fore, may rise to Art. Day after day, day and night, year 
upon year, the ideal and the performance consume the 
soul. The world is not merely careless of the artist, 
but essentially ignorant of him, blind to him.^ The mod- 
ern world requires every man to make a living, or to 
show cause or privilege to live without working for a 
living. With this, the world rests. The world (the age, 
the time), this world of the present passing economic 
regime, is not concerned with Art : ours is no time of 
cathedral-building. What few pageants we have pass and 
are forgotten ; our world-expositions are confessedly 
ephemeral ; our operas, our picture-galleries, our tapes- 
tries, our ceremonies are for the few. Yet Art is eternal, 
universal, public. And Art endures and conquers in the 
good and proper fullness of time that shields, sanctifies, 
and saves all truth. 

Of '* the masterless man," " afflicted with the magic of 
the necessary words " that " become alive and walk up 
and down in the hearts of all hearers," Kipling has said 
that " there is no room for pity, for mercy, for respect, 
for fear, or even for loyalty between man and his fellow 
man when the record of the tribe comes to be written." 
" It must satisfy alike the keenest vanity and the deep- 
est self-knowledge of the present ; it must satisfy also 
the most shameless curiosity of the future." "By the 
light of his words, our children will judge us"; and we 
all desire beyond everything else "to stand well with 
our children." ^ 

1 " William Dean Howells said to me, * The artist, the only person in the 
world who is in the right, is made by our social system the only person 
who is in the wrong.' " Du Bois, " A Student of Drawing," Quarterly 
Illustrator, 1894, p. 183. 

2 Address, Royal Academy, May 7, 1906, London. Report, N. V. Sttn. 



ART 331 

The man who intends to become supreme in his art aims 
at nothing less than perfection, knowing that this alone 
can never be surpassed, and desiring it partly because it 
is unattainable. Life, health, pleasure, property, family, 
become to him, at most, but as means to his end, at 
worst, as nothing. He has some thing, perhaps many 
things, to express ; and in getting this thing out of him- 
self, in a perfect mode or form, he comes to see the 
real world as a spectacle, the ideal world as real. Then 
does the artist often commit what seem to the common 
world terrible offenses ; and so they would be in com- 
mon men. He has (or he thinks that he has) a message 
to give, a thought to create into an object, an emotion 
to teach for the social harmony ; and because of the 
burden, he goes roughshod about the world, or shrinks 
into solitude, or becomes intoxicated with the idea and 
wanders gently about, dissipating time and attention and 
energy, until in the great appointed hour, the whole, 
formed, illumined, vital, is ready to be said or sung or 
painted or built in the open world. 

Art is a tyrant ; the artist is a slave. One art requires 
the organic training of every limb, of eye and ear and 
touch, — the art of music upon the great reed-organ of 
orchestral power and choral beauty. Art is a taskmaster ; 
the artist is a workman under bonds. He who would 
master the art of painting must begin in his youth to por- 
tray the appearance of things and to project upon paper 
or canvas forms of beauty evolved in imagination or 
fancy. The price of sensitiveness to beauty is continual 
hearkening with obedience. 

There are many arts, general and special. The arts 
are beyond and above the sciences and cannot be scien- 
tifically classified and ranked. The sciences themselves 
weave their edges together, for who shall say where 
biology ends and psychology begins } Shall sociology, 
economics, political science, ethics, or jurisprudence 



332 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

answer the question, To whom of right does ground-rent 
belong ? ^ Similarly, the arts may coalesce. Is the song- 
writer musician or poet ? Ruskin has explained elo- 
quently the fine distinctions between outline, light and 
shade, color, form, and substance. Potter or sculptor, 
athlete or acrobat, physician or surgeon, pianist or organ- 
ist, politician or statesman, writer or orator, novelist or 
essayist, poet or dramatist, the artist may die not know- 
ing to which art he would owe his posthumous fame. 

Art finds its origin in love of the beautiful, goes to 
work, acquires efficiency, at last finds expression. Of 
any particular example of this art, the most that the 
artist can say is that it expresses his ideal well enough 
for him not to desire to work longer upon it. He knows 
that no work of art can ever be perfect. 

Art never originates in anything else than in a passion 
to express completely the idea at work in the soul ; 
therefore, the artistic is the truthful made orderly, peace- 
ful, and general. Art can never be evaluated in terms of 
anything else. It is incommensurate with time, with 
labor, with pain, with pleasure, with property, with 
money. Art is worth everything or nothing. A work of 
art has no value because it cost this or that in education, 
labor, materials, self-denial, time to produce. It has no 
economic value even in relation to other works of art, 
though it has many other values, historical, cultural, crit- 
ical, moral. The world of art is a world by itself. It is 
the supreme objective product of man because it is his 
essence.^ 

The artisan is the man who has not risen above effi- 
ciency in his work. This may be due to various causes : 

1 Certain Western States make homesteads exempt from debt. None 
yet grant and guarantee homesteads to all. It is no more right to bargain 
for homestead land than for slaves. Patten, New Basis of Civilization, 
p. 152. This proposition to place homestead land extra commercium is 
discussed at length in Pollock, The Land Laws, chapter vii. 

2 " Art is man's nature." Boswell, Life of Johnson. 



ART 333 

he may not sufficiently love beauty, he may work for the 
reward, he may be on the road to Art, but may not yet 
have reached its first gate, which is self-effacement ; he 
may have been prevented from journeying farther and 
may have been forced to remain an artisan. 

The true artist, whether he be poor or rich, is none the 
less a resident in the palace of life. He who carves wood 
well, makes it tell a story, may earn less money than his 
brother the carpenter ; but he may not take his brother 
with him into the palace. It may, indeed, be well with 
all the workers in houses and barns, in fields and mines, 
in shops and mills. Every genuine work that sustains 
life — life physical or psychical, individual or social — 
is good. Art is the second power of work. It issues from 
work of sufficient intelligence and devotion, because God 
has so made man that such work delivers his deeper 
nature from its imprisonment in circumstance. To him 
who desires to become an artist, the command is simple : 
Work in the faith that the end crowns all genuine, com- 
petent work. Whether the work be genuine depends 
upon the desire and the devotion, which are, we believe, 
somewhat within the control of the workman ; but 
whether the work be competent, or will become compe- 
tent, depends upon the intellect, which is with the Maker 
of the workman.^ If the work be not competent, if it 
can never become competent, the workman does not 
know it, for the self-criticism that tells one of his failure 
also conditions and forwards his success. The man with 
the instinct for the work that is to lead him to Art, "the 
capacity for taking infinite pains," knows at the outset 
clearly and simply that he must acquire the method of 
Art, the historical, and the general, if possible, the uni- 
versal method. He obeys this knowledge by studying the 

1 " Intellect is not a power, but an instrument worked by forces behind 
it. Reason is an eye through which desires look." Spencer, Social Statics^ 
1851, p. 350- 



334 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

methods of other artists, the best artists known to him. 
He realizes fully that "individuality of method is but 
the effort of ignorance to imagine what has not been 
learned."^ True art is without individuality, the work 
alone exists and delights, not merely because the artist 
was self-forgetful when he wrought the work, but also 
because he had long ago discarded his own individual 
notions and opinions, seeking only and always the best, 
the most general, the ideal. 

The working efficiency that is the material of artistic 
skill may express itself in unremitting daily industry or 
in periods of excessive effort alternating with longer or 
shorter periods of exhaustion, rest, and recuperation. 
But it can never be developed late in life. When devel- 
oped in youth in certain modes and expended in certain 
directions, in manhood it may be transformed to other 
modes and set in other directions. Like electricity, it 
may drive machinery, produce light and heat, or trans- 
mit messages ; but also like electricity it must be itself 
produced or induced. Art finds its origin, therefore, in 
the release of the primal energy of the soul. Education 
must effect such a release, and must effect it while 
muscles and nerves and brain-cells are in process of form- 
ation, organization, and correlation. 

Americans and Englishmen might well learn of the 
French, the Italians, the Germans, the Japanese, the 
Chinese, and the Hindoos that Art lends beauty to life.^ 
Art is to life what the sky is to the earth. This truth 
has a very practical bearing. The joy in beauty continues 
unceasingly and renews itself by contemplation of the 
beautiful object. God made the human soul upon this 
fashion. The more a workman seeks to find beauty in his 
work, to make every product an art-product, the happier 

1 Fromentin, Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, p. 177. 

2 '* The environment transforms the animal, while man transforms the 
environment." Ward, Psychic Factors in Civilization, p. 257. 



ART 335 

he is, for he is helping to fill the world with beauty and 
is filling his own memory with images of beauty. The 
finis of art would be a world made wholly beautiful. 

We cannot make American automobiles so good as the 
French, for one clear reason. Our mechanics work for 
wages, our engineers work for salaries, and our business 
men work for profits. The machine to be made is a means to the 
end. The French work for wages, for salaries, and for profits 
that they may go on making better and better machines. 
Each nation gets what it desires, — we Americans the wealth, 
the French the delight in fine machinery. Neither really 
" competes " with the other. Each travels a different road ; 
but each travels. 

To our Art defectiveness, we are blind, and therefore 
indifferent. We sometimes mourn that this man or that 
has no knowledge of history or of literature. Less often 
we charge his failure in life to inefficiency. Once in a 
while, we speak of one as law-honest, controlled only by 
conventional morals, having no genuine appreciation of 
general and essential morals. But with all our social self- 
criticism we seem to agree that to expect any one not a 
"professor" to know anything scientifically, or any one 
not an ** artist" to be able to make any object of art, or 
even to appreciate the object, is beyond common sense 
or discernible reason. Nor have we seriously or otherwise 
proposed this to ourselves, that it is our duty to society, 
to mankind, to the nation, and to each individual man to 
make of him, if we and he together can achieve this, 
a man of scientific knowledge, or, still better, of artistic 
power. We do not feel the beauty or sincerity or other 
value of what art we see ; we do not feel the truth or 
meaning or other value of what science we discern ; and 
having no feelings for the realities, we can have no 
desires for their presence or increase except in so far 
as perhaps we have inherited from nobler ancestors the 



336 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

instincts for the beautiful or for the simply true.* As 
for women, one who struggles out of the social quick- 
sand and reaches the solid ground of science or the 
free water of Art must do so by her own strength, aided 
perhaps by some sister or brother scientist or artist, but 
derided and impeded by society. 

It is so all over Europe.? It has been so in all ages.-* 
By no manner of means. Hitherto the great civilizations, 
as far as their institutions have permitted, have always 
rejoiced to help the ambitious and consecrated man or 
woman. Western Europe still rejoices in the strength and 
zeal of the young. We present a curious anomaly. Our 
institutions are far more favorable to the rise of youth of 
talent and energy ; but, save in isolated communities, we 
are dead to the glory of the only true aristocracy, that 
of worth. The more honor and the more gratitude, there- 
fore, to those few communities and individual men 
that have forwarded the progress of youth in Science 
or in Art. 

However, the need is too great for individual or even 
community endeavor. The entire force of public and 
private education and culture ought to be directed toward 
producing as many as possible true scientists and artists, 
that the nation may be wise and the land be filled with 
the beauty of sincere and complete truth. Such truth 
must include the life of human emotion as well as of 
pure thought. Life as a whole resembles the architec- 
tonic grandeur of the musical orchestra or the architec- 
tonic complexity of the theatrical drama, — architectonic 
because it includes so many arts. Pictures, vistas, pano- 
ramas are swept across the vision of the soul ; and the 
soul responds with sentiments, emotions, despairs, and 

1 Spencer was substantially, though not universally, correct when he 
said : " Desires are cravings for the return to consciousness of real feel- 
ings." Principles of Psychology , pp. 126, 273. We have never experi- 
enced these real feelings of music, of poetry, or of other arts. 



ART 337 

ecstasies. These states and conditions of the soul Art 
crystalHzes in a melody, a symphony, an opera, a poem, 
a drama, a painting, a sculpture, a story, a novel, a design, 
an essay, — whatever form the artist who conceives the 
thought afresh finds his hand or voice or imagination 
ready to execute. Therefore truth in Art is the thing as 
the artist sees it, and seeing re-creates. 

The worlds of Science, Art, and Philosophy are all 
democracies. No man can say that it is greater or higher 
or profounder to discover a truth in geology than in 
zoology, in economics than in mathematics. At present 
a particular science may appear to be a cul de sac ; a day 
later there may open out from it a wide avenue into the 
universe. Nor may any one safely predict when or where 
or by whom the new way shall appear. There are, how- 
ever, at particular times, correlations, inclusions, exclu- 
sions, limits, disputed fields, that later may be changed 
but now are very real. Of the arts also, no man may 
safely predict what developments the future has in store. 

Art is democratic. No man may rightly say that a 
thing of beauty in one particular art is more beautiful 
than a thing of beauty in some other art. A poem as an 
art product does not transcend a cathedral ; or an opera, 
a drama ; or a statue, a painting. One may indeed be 
more important than another because at present it con- 
cerns more persons or more important persons ; but 
Giotto who built the tower sits in Art with Longfellow 
who wrote the sonnet : — 

How many lives, made beautiful and sweet 
By self-devotion and by self-restraint, 
Whose pleasure is to run without complaint 

On unknown errands of the Paraclete, 

Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet, 
Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint 
Around the shining forehead of the saint, 

And are in their completeness incomplete ! 



338 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's tower 
The lily of Horence blossoming in stone, — 
A vision, a delight, and a desire, — 
The builder's perfect and centennial flower, 
That in the night of ages bloomed alone, 
But wanting still the glory of the spire. 

It is the technique in such art as this that conceals the 
art. 

This technique includes skill and judgment in these 
several respects : The master-artist possesses his body 
in every part that is concerned with his art, and directs 
it as a whole and in each part concerned ; therefore, he 
can do what he desires. This possession and this power 
of direction he secured by physical effort unremitted 
until the victory was won and his body was put under ; 
and these he maintains by continued effort. He has 
won over into the field of consciousness his emotions, 
passions, and desires, rationalizing them only in part but 
understanding them as wholes. He knows his funda- 
mental, original, primitive self. He has mastered the 
mechanical elements that concern his art, and all its tools 
and instruments and recording devices. By his tech- 
nical art, he expresses only what he understands. He is, 
therefore, substantially in his creative moods the master 
of his soul as he is at all times master of his body. He 
has gone out into life, has observed the facts, has dis- 
covered and to a degree interpreted the events, and has 
taken the lessons thereof to heart, by feeling their real- 
ity, their nearness, their akinness to his own experi- 
ences. He has enlarged his personality into sociality and 
thereby absorbed society as far as he knows it.^ He has 
found the way of escape out of his own introspectiveness 
into the objective world, can feel what another person 
might feel, achieves, it may be, various other personalities, 
and has forgotten the limitations of his own individuality. 

1 Norton, " The Intellectual Element in Music," Studies in Philosophy 
and Psychology. 



ART 339 

He knows the achievement of other artists. Lastly, 
he has now the mastery of the essential things present 
in consciousness in these moods and holds to them, 
discarding the non-essentials. Thus physical control, 
psychical understanding, social truthfulness, imagination 
that bodies forth ideas as realities, and judgment that 
selects and discards, conspire to make the artist ; but 
they cannot make the art-product. 

What the artist of any kind produces will fall into one 
of two classes : art-products of the first class represent- 
ing the syntheses of long reflective periods, maturing 
gradually in consecutive creative moods alternating with 
moods of reverie and criticism, and art-products of the 
second class representing the syntheses of sudden creat- 
ive moods that are apparently accidental and uncaused. 
To the first class belong the architectonic displays char- 
acteristic of Angelo, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Beethoven ; 
to the second, the sudden gusts of passionate art in 
Demosthenes, Byron, Poe, Heine. All the greater artists 
have achieved both kinds of success, — Shakespeare, 
Verestchagin, Wagner, Tennyson ; but in various degrees. 
Can such power be taught .■* No ; but if present, it can 
be inhibited, combined, saved, directed, utilized, and 
disciplined ; and this process culminates in Art. 

The triumphs of Art are higher than the triumphs of 
Science as such for several reasons : Art is a functioning 
of Science, a kind of higher applied Science, being im- 
possible without Science ; moreover, until Science finds 
a sufficient tool in some appropriate art-technic, it can- 
not accomplish its ends, nor does it convince the world 
until it has found some form or mode of art-expression ; 
and Science in itself, being essentially intellectual, does 
not stir the souls of men as does the least of the arts — 
for every art is essentially affective and affectional. Art 
is magic, is miracle, is incomprehensible and incredible. 
We do not know it or believe it or understand it : we 



340 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

obey. Art masters the souls of the sons of men because it 
has first mastered the soul of the artist. Art is surrender 
to motives, delight in absorption in ideals, conviction of 
values : it is delivery from chaos into cosmos, from the 
fleeting into the eternal, from the particular into the 
universal. We love Art because it embodies and visions 
forth the love that the artist felt in it. And this is the 
final test of pseudo-art, wherein it fails ; that we regret 
its memory and resent its presence. 



CHAPTER XVI 

PHILOSOPHY 

There is one only good, that is, knowledge; and one only evil, that is, ignorance.— 
Diogenes Laertius, Socrates, xiv. 

Philosophy is completely unified knowledge. — Spencer, First Principles, part 2, chap- 
ter I, § 37- 

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, 
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good 
report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. — Paul, 
Epistle to Phil, iv, 8. 

Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. — Emerson, "Fate," Conduct of 
Life. 

By observation, one may acquire facts. By listening 
and by reading, one may receive facts. By study, one 
may organize facts into a body of knowledge. But the 
result of all the observation, reading, investigation, and 
consideration, of all the activity of the senses, the literacy, 
the diligence, the honest inquiry, the science, the art, 
and the knowledge of years of life may yet be disap- 
pointing, even disconcerting. The natural, or at least 
the logical, culmination of Intelligence is Science ; of 
Efficiency, Art ; of Morality, Philosophy. Science is the 
second power of Intelligence ; Art, the second power of 
Efficiency; Philosophy, the second power of Morality. 
The experience that in thinking functions first as Intel- 
ligence by longer processes of the undiscovered essential 
spirit may function later as Science, whose substance is 
the ideal ; the experience that in willing functions first 
as Efficiency by longer processes of the same spirit may 
function later as Art, whose substance is the motive ; and 
the experience that in feeling functions first as Morality 
may function later as Philosophy, whose substance is the 



342 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

intent. The mystery and miracle lie in the functioning, 
which some may perform but others may not, whose 
nature and essence are hidden in the spirit until man 
knows himself even as he is known. Culture itself, 
rightly considered, is but a higher, a sublimated stage 
of education. And the well-educated man does not rest 
content until his developed powers have borne the fruits 
of culture, which are Science, Art, and Philosophy. 
Education may be completed in adolescence ; but culture, 
the refining of powers, the manifesting of results, the 
evidence that education has been worth while, is the 
occupation of manhood and the solace of old age. 

It pleases the Creator of man to give him in youth 
a certain capital, greater or less, a certain number of 
talents. Of manhood, God requires the capital to be put 
to use. In old age. He asks an accounting.^ It is well 
for us to accept the fact, to rejoice that the burden of 
responsibility does not grow heavier with each year 
of life. Neither youth nor manhood can dispassionately 
take toll of itself, for youth is full of hope that more 
power may yet be given, and manhood is busy with faith- 
ful discharging of its trusts. At last, however, in the 
normal life, not cut off before the second twilight, there 
comes old age, calmly ; and its coming is welcome. Then 
man looks back and measures the track from dawn till 
dark. By this retrospect, life gathers to itself complete- 
ness.^ 

To the life-process, by which the soul of the human 
being comes to the only perfectness possible to the finite 
creature, the education-culture-process is closely ana- 
logous. For Philosophy, like old age, busies itself with 
retrospection and seeks harmony and reconciliation. And 
as, in old age, one who sees what he has done that he 
ought not to have done, and what he has not done that 

1 Parable of the talents. Jesus, Matthew, Gospel, xxv, 15-25. 
' Shaler, The Individual^ chapter x. 



PHILOSOPHY 343 

he ought to have done, comforts one's self with sorrow 
for errors and with faith that the great temporal world, 
which one is about to leave, will not miss one, so the 
philosopher who knows how great are the gaps in his 
knowledge, how prone to fallacies all his opinions are, 
how self-deceiving all his motives, comforts himself with 
the universal outlook. The philosopher — whether his 
life be mainly good or evil as others view it, whether he 
be Aristotle or Spinoza or Schopenhauer, historian, 
primitive ballad-singer, ruler, mechanic, farmer, man-in- 
the-street — seeks to order his knowledge in a system 
wherein the principles radiate outward from a central 
thesis with due rank of superiority and subordination. 
He knows how incomplete the system is, that indeed he 
can never complete it ; but by means of the system, 
he is reconciled to life. Men differ not as beings with 
and beings without Philosophy, but as philosophers of 
various kinds, extents, and qualities. Ignorant men are 
not less but rather more prone to philosophizing than 
men of larger knowledge. They are quite as likely to 
arrive at items of real truth as are any other men (this 
is true empirically and also logically, for were it not 
true, then life would be both a deception and a wrong, 
and the giver of life entirely evil) ; but they cannot 
compass as great a round of truth. Therefore, their 
philosophical contribution to their fellow men is less. 
Moreover, there is but little likelihood that an ignor- 
ant man may discover any new truth, make any original 
or larger synthesis, or bring forth anything that shall 
be forever afterward indispensable to mankind. And 
yet in times past unlearned men have made such dis- 
coveries, for the human soul is not utterly dependent 
upon formal circumstance and opportunity for knowledge 
of the truth. Moses, Paul, and Kant asserted the original 
power of the soul to know the truth. It may be that 
knowledge of truth is as much a constituent part or form 



344 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

of the immaterial soul as the soul is a constituent part or 
form of the material cells by which heredity flows from 
parents to child, in generation after generation. Cer- 
tainly th*e power to recognize truth and the instinct for 
it are part and parcel of our common humanity.^ Cer- 
tainly the minds even of ignorant men revolve and try 
to resolve the problems and the principles of what world 
they know, meaning to find the heart of it, to make a 
universe of it. In such state, each man in his degree is 
a philosopher.^ 

It is not, however, with the natural, the seemingly 
inevitable, philosophies of ignorant or half-taught men 
that the science of education is concerned, but it is 
rather with historical philosophy and particularly with 
the highest philosophy to which man in the modern age 
has at last attained. This highest philosophy is by no 
means wholly modern : it is very largely the philosophy 
that has survived the academic discussions and the life- 
and-death conflicts of many ages and of many peoples. 
No summary of this final philosophy can be compassed 
in the pages of a brief chapter : nor is such a summary 
logically within the purview of this book. While in a 
certain sense, the educational ideals of the first round 
— Intelligency, Efficiency, and Morality — express them- 
selves in concrete examples and are conditioned by such 
exemplification, the ideals of the second round — Science, 
Art, and Philosophy — are independent of particular in- 
stances and modes. Of the highest ideal in this cycle. 
Philosophy, this is true in nearly every sense, as appears 
in every definition of Philosophy. Let us call it "the 
science of sciences" or "theory of rational conduct" or 

1 '* Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing awe and admiration : 
the starlit heavens above, and the moral law within," Kant, Works (Rosen- 
kranz transl.), vol. viii, p. 312. 

2 This, of course, is the lesson taught by the novelists, conspicuously 
by Dickens, George Eliot, and Hawthorne. 



PHILOSOPHY 345 

"unitary view of knowledge" or *'of the world" or "of 
life " or " system " or '' history of pure thought," Philo- 
sophy is always incorporeal, remote from material things, 
and absorbed in the things that are spiritual, — that is, 
in the life beyond, above, and within living things. Sci- 
ence is content to search, to know, and to understand, Art 
to do, to make, and to appreciate ; but Philosophy is con- 
tent only to think, to feel, and to desire. Science is out 
in the world, Art is forthputting one's self into the world ; 
but Philosophy is bringing back into one's self all that one 
may of the world of Nature and of Man. The philosophy 
that eventuates may hold that Nature transcends Man, 
produces and reduces him, or may hold, diametrically 
opposite, that Man conceives Nature, gives it the appear- 
ance of rationality, and endures before Nature was and 
after it shall have passed : whatever the opinion be, if it 
be able to render its reason, it is still Philosophy. 

Because Philosophy is essentially the gathering and 
folding of the world into one's self, and, therefore, more 
purely human than Science or Art, it is both historical 
and personal. The wealth of one's philosophical treas- 
ures depends upon one's knowledge of the philosophies 
of men since they began to record and to display them ; 
but to their possessor the value of these treasures de- 
pends upon his ability and inclination to use and to 
increase them by his own thinking. To say this is to say 
more than that the eye of the intellect sees in all 
objects what it brought with it the means of seeing,^ for 
it includes more than seeing, — considering, rejecting, 
accepting, absorbing, utilizing, interpreting. And it is 
also to say more than that the content of the intellect 
comes from experience,^ for it includes the contents of 
heart and of will also. There is an historical philosophy 

1 Carlyle, Collected Works, vol. v, p. 309 (now a very common ob- 
servation ).. 

2 Caldwell, Schopen/iaiier^s System in its Philosophical Significajice. 



346 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

that is contained in logic, in ethics, in metaphysics, and in 
poetry ; and there is another historical philosophy incor- 
porate in deeds, in institutions, and in customs. The 
books one may read, the deeds one must diligently and 
anxiously consider. The books are jewels; the deeds, 
metallic ores. 

This folding of the world into one's self is the human 
quality that makes man what he is, an alien from all 
animals, a possible son of God upon earth. According 
to his disposition, this infolding induces in the individ- 
ual philosopher his particular and characteristic mood; 
indeed, it converts his individuality into personality. 
For although personality transcends individuality, even 
transforming it, reducing (as it were) the various ores 
of the original soul, each to its pure metal, precious or 
base, overlaying the coarse with the fine, no man, what- 
ever be his education, can go entirely free from the orig- 
inal heritage and bondage of temperament, disposition, 
and aptitude.^ Whether for good or for ill, the past of 
heredity can never be wholly eradicated or converted. 
Regenerations are never original generations. 

The individual gives to his philosophy the color of his 
own soul. The philosophy of no two men can ever be 
the same ; at most, we are but sympathetic occupiers of 
similar grounds. As Plato interpreted Socrates, express- 
ing, expanding, and expounding him, far beyond his own 
powers of self-revelation, as Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schel- 
ling, Hegel, and all the rest of the brood of the post- 
Kantians, without perfect agreement among themselves, 
developed, improved, corrected, and modified the mas- 
ter, none ever wholly agreeing with him, so all of us, 
whether empiricists, materialists, rationalists, monists, 
pluralists, naturalists, idealists, or anything and every- 

1 " The biological origin of mind is a main avenue to the deeper secrets 
of the universe and of the futurity of man." Nichols, Philosophical 
Review, September, 1892, p. 534. 



PHILOSOPHY 347 

thing else at the same or at different times, disagree 
upon some articles of our particular faiths, as our lives 
or our words invariably show. And this color of the soul 
displays itself in contradictory ways. One man who is 
by nature gloomy becomes a disciple of the philosophy 
of fate because that doctrine comports with his own 
mood, fits him easily, interprets himself; while another 
of the same sad nature dons the garb of the absolute 
idealist, hoping against hope, as it were, that the natural 
man in him is entirely wrong, and that the will of the indi- 
vidual is kin and companion with the will of a gracious, 
personal, immanent God. 

The same experience functions in one soul in one mode, 
in others in other modes. Yet civilization seems to induce 
persistently the mode of melancholy. " Every man hath evil 
enough of his own ; and it is hard for a man to live soberly, 
temperately, and religiously ; but when he hath parents and 
children, brothers and sisters, friends and enemies, buyers 
and sellers, lawyers and physicians, a family and a neighbor- 
*hood, a king over him, or tenants under him, a bishop to rule 
in matters of government spiritual, and a people to be ruled 
by him in the affairs of their souls ; then it is that every man 
dashes against another, and one relation requires what an- 
other desires ; and when one speaks, another will contradict 
him ; and that which is well spoken, is sometimes innocently 
mistaken, and that upon a good cause, produces an evil ef- 
fect ; and by these and ten thousand other concurrent causes, 
man is made more than most miserable." ^ 

Intelligence, Efficiency, Morality ; Science, Art : all 
these add knowledge or skill to man ; but Philosophy 
adds nothing of either kind. One may study all the 
histories of philosophies and all the philosophies them- 
selves (and, as has been said so emphatically, every 
philosopher must have his own philosophy) ; in the end, 
he will know nothing that he did not .know before and 

1 Jeremy Taylor, Works, vol. ix, p. 316. 



348 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

have no skill that he did not have before. And yet, 
paradoxical as it ssems, unless he has been unable to 
apprehend them in the least particular, he is certain to 
be a different man, in the greater or less degree that 
marked his apprehension of philosophic truth, for Phil- 
osophy, though not constructive and certainly not de- 
structive, is reconstructive. No philosophic truth ever 
was or can be new truth, ever did or can destroy any 
old truth. Thus, Philosophy has no war with Science 
or Religion or Art or Politics or any other systematic 
activity of man. The business of Philosophy is to evalu- 
ate all truths in the term of truth itself, to the extent 
that the philosopher himself knows it, — to collate, to 
arrange, to systematize, to interpret, and to appreciate 
them, — in order that the philosopher may possess a co- 
herent, rational, truthful world of thought, of action, and 
of affection. Consequently, with every new truth ac- 
quired, the philosopher is obligated by his profession of 
philosophy, whether the profession be private only or 
both private and public, to square his philosophy again 
so that the new truth be orientated and correlated within 
the philosophy. And, therefore, it follows that the man 
with a mind wide open to the world of reality never has 
a finished, final philosophy. Or, to put this conversely, 
a true philosophy is never complete ; but like life itself 
forever changes and grows. 

What of the foregoing is true regarding the philosophy 
of the individual as he proceeds through life is substan- 
tially true of Philosophy itself as a living body of thought. 
In the history of Philosophy, every truth and every opin- 
ion has had a place, a meaning, a value in philosophical 
progress. A sane man has never had a false philosophy : 
imperfection, incompleteness, let us say frankly, ignor- 
ance, — but not falsity, not even error without return, — 
has characterized the opinions of men regarding Nature, 
Being, Knowledge, Duty, Freedom, and Things-to-Come. 



PHILOSOPHY 349 

In other words, from Thales to the latest modern, Philo- 
sophy has advanced continuously and has widened 
immensely its line of march. ^ 

To say this is, of course, to define somewhat my own posi- 
tion. Every philosophy, whether of Democritus or of Berke- 
ley, is substantially true, is explicable in the light of the age, 
of the land, and of the quality of the particular philosopher 
declaring it. Moreover, when of sufficient importance to be 
considered by others, it has necessarily been incorporated in 
the content of historical philosophy. The reason is simple : 
human reason is one among all men, conditioning humanity. 
Otherwise, there can be no truth for all men, for most men, 
for some men, or for any man. No sane man can reason un- 
reasonably, untruly, erroneously ; but, of course, he may be 
wrong or imperfectly informed as to his data. To say this is 
not to juggle with the term sanity, but is to use it scientific- 
ally : since sanity is the power to reason correctly, which 
postulates correct reason as the common possession of hu- 
manity and truth as the certain attainment of reasoning men. 
We do, in fact, go even so far as to say that no one can 
reason wrongly, for that is nothing else than not reasoning 
at all. From this dialectic, which might, no doubt, be pre- 
sented more in detail, the familiar conclusion of the text fol- 
lows, that every individual philosophy has been a contribution, 
great or small, and never a detriment to the sum total of 
Philosophy. The extent of its contribution has been measured 
by its originality. 

Every man tends to recapitulate the philosophy of the 
race unless he interferes with the natural process by 
reading philosophy. Such philosophy as springs from 
life in its course must of necessity be psychologically 

1 "Any one who is acquainted with the history of nineteenth century 
thinking would say that one of its great characteristic achievements is 
to have shown Nature to include both what was previously known as 
natural and what was previously known as spiritual." Caldwell, Schopen- 
hauer's System in its Philosophical Significance, p. 23. 



350 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

sound and historically uniform.^ Of necessity, each man 
who faces life intelhgently must ask the great questions, 
— Whence ? Whither ? Why ? How ? The forms and 
occasions of these questions differ, the substance is ever 
the same.^ The answers also vary in their forms, though 
not in their content. But to reach the questions too 
early, to anticipate the anxieties of life before experience 
has given the facts and the skill required to endure them, 
to run where one should walk : this is to imperil sanity 
itself, as the suicide of many a young student so sadly 
testifies. Life itself in its haphazard too often forces 
us into unnatural positions with relations essentially 
incomprehensible to the insufficiently experienced.^ 
"Beware who ventureth," said Gilder of the sonnet, — 

" For like a fjord the narrow floor is laid 
Deep as mid ocean to the sheer mountain walls." 

Such a sea is Philosophy, — a sea of every climate and 
of storm and calm. But the sea is for sailors only to live 
upon, to enjoy, to grow strong thereon. A single voyage, 
as the passenger of a book or two, is enough for most. 
For the rest of our philosophy, we content ourselves with 
the tidal inlets that cut into our lands and with the 
distilled waters that fall upon us gently in showers from 
the sky. The philosophy of the books is indeed often a 
bitter brine, — product as it is often of life in some nar- 
row and peculiar reality. Life as a whole is not life as seen 

^ " The real philosopher ought not to be content with a view of the 
world that can be fully expressed in abstract conceptions." Caldwell, 
Schopenhauer' s System in its Philosophical Significance, p. 127. 

2 "The individual now confronts the world with as pronounced a sense 
of wonder and of mystery as he did in the morning of creation." Caldwell, 
Schopenhauer'' s System in its Philosophical Significance, p. 20. 

3 This may be stated mechanically in the terms of sociolog)' and of 
psychology : as sociology, in that the individual faces the problems of 
larger groups or different groups, not yet understood ; and as psychology, 
in that he faces situations, before his soul, in motives, intellections, affec- 
tions, intentions, and habits, is ready for them. 



PHILOSOPHY 351 

by this German mysogenic sensualist or that French de- 
cadent, nor even by philosophers generally (for Philo- 
sophers are but a class, and not the type, of humanity) ; 
but it is life seen by all men and women in all lands and 
ages, and this life is good and satisfying as its multipli- 
cation, extension, and intensification demonstrate to the 
observant. 

Because in its natural course the philosophy of the 
individual repeats that of the race, the history of Philo- 
sophy and the study of comparative philosophy, which 
displays the stage attained by particular nations, take on 
compelling significance. 

An extended review of the history of Philosophy would 
be disagreeable here to the common sense of the competent. 
It is enough to remind ourselves that Philosophy began with 
a naturalism that tried to construct a theogony to the end 
that man might relate himself wisely to the reality behind 
appearance and opinion. In other words, Primitive Religion 
was the mother of Philosophy ; and Reason, seeking to under- 
stand the world, was its father. Conscience taught man re- 
verence, reason led him to postulate purposiveness, and ex- 
perience proved to him that the purposiveness was not the 
caprice of individual gods, but a universal plan. As the theo- 
logians had grown out of the priests, so physicians (physicists) 
were to grow out of theologians. School succeeded school, 
each learning from its predecessors and its rivals. Men dis- 
cussed matter, change, permanence, elements, being, becom- 
ing, and anticipated many a principle of the modern sciences. 
Philosophy soon discovered itself as the crucible of all know- 
ledge. ' Materialism arose to reveal and to offset spiritualism ; 
and pluralism arose to explain monism. Methods of reasoning 
are developed and systematized ; and we are able to isolate 
the principles of hypothesis, logic, dialectic, syllogism, induc- 
tion. Space, time, motion, series, cause, quantity, quality, and 
relation are disclosed. Infinity and limitation, eternity and 
period are considered. Creation and destruction, life and 
death, society and the individual, one after another, present 



352 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

themselves upon the philosophic stage. Man is learning 
himself, as a whole, and in detail. Knowledge and skepticism, 
truth and falsity, reason and sensation, God and man, soul and 
body, and many another antithesis furnish foci for the ellipse 
of thought. After several centuries, metaphysics comes to 
know itself and to cast out physics ; and Philosophy assumes 
a superiority to Science never afterwards to be questioned in 
its own thought. Then Philosophy proper becomes critical ; 
and symptoms of a new differentiation, that of psychology, 
appear. In Socrates and Plato, criticism and idealism, the 
assertion of moTa.\ity per se, the assertion likewise of Philo- 
sophy as supreme, and the discovery of ideas as the true 
realities constitute Philosophy the guide of human life. For 
those who can understand, Philosophy has become forever 
the highest achievement of the mind of man. Aristotle demon- 
strates this by accomplishing the broadest and most original 
synthesis of knowledge ever attempted, not to say success- 
fully carried out. 

We are now upon the edges of the world-transformations 
by the Roman conquest, the Teutonic invasions, and the suc- 
cess of Christianity. Philosophic progress, like all progress, 
flows with many windings, often subterraneously in darkness. 
Men inquire Avhether life is worth living, how to make it tol- 
erable, how to get the greatest happiness out of it, what is 
pleasure, what is truth, what is virtue. Polytheism, pantheism, 
theism, supernaturalism, agnosticism : each goes into the 
battle, and truth organizes victory. Stoicism confronted the 
world of politics ; but the Caesars represented laws and forces 
triumphant at certain stages in every civilization known to 
history. The truth in stoicism is eternal, rises again and 
again, and endures. Men inquired whether speculation is 
not useless and patient obedience to Nature the one duty. 
From Rome, the centre of Philosophy moved to Alexandria ; 
and Hellenism sought reconciliation with Judaism. Into that 
struggle of thought, monotheistic Christianity, with its dogma 
of the Son of God become man to save mankind and men, 
projected a new, a genuine, religion, an intense faith such as 
civilization had not known since Zeus ruled in Greece, Jupiter 



PHILOSOPHY 353 

in Rome, and Osiris in Egypt. Over against the Utopia 
of the Stoa for the solace of the wise and the great, was the 
Kingdom of God, preached by Jesus and Paul, for the com- 
forting of the ignorant and the humble. Eclecticism, Gnos- 
ticism, Neo-Platonism, Buddhism, mysticism, rationalism, 
theurgy, fill the minds of philosophers and overflow upon their 
parchments. The world that Parmenides thought to resolve 
into simplicity itself has become complicated beyond the 
power of reason to resolve : the question, Can God commun- 
icate with man ? baffles Philosophy. The doctrine of the 
Logos is revived, the Christian world recovers Plato and later 
discovers Aristotle, who for a thousand years is accounted 
" the philosopher." In that " long waste of years " until Des- 
cartes, the philosophic world debated over realism and nom- 
inalism (that is, idealism and materialism), over every theo- 
logical doctrine, from the nature of God to the method of 
redemption. Asceticism, imperialism, revelation, determinism, 
nature, freedom of the will, innate ideas, theosophy, a new 
skepticism, kept scholasticism busy through these centuries 
while other great questions slept. Then arose Giordano 
Bruno to set Philosophy once more free from Religion as Soc- 
rates had set it free two thousand years before ; and to die as 
he had died, because State and Church were one and politics 
and religion indistinguishable. He took his first principle 
from the new physics : God is natura natiirans, and the world 
natura naturata. God is the universe transcending the world 
of space and of time. After the Italian came an Englishman, 
Francis Bacon, discoverer and expounder of a method, the re- 
lation of Science to Metaphysics. Descartes discovered the 
question and answer, reviving for metaphysics the certainty 
of Science. " I believe that I may know," said the Scholastics. 
" I doubt that I may know," queried Descartes, to reply, "I 
think, that is, I am." Thus, the world of Philosophy found 
a central sun of certain knowledge about which to revolve. 
Spinoza, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Comte, 
Hegel, Darwin, Spencer, with their respective pantheistic, 
atomistic, idealistic, critical, rational, positivistic, scientific, 
monistic, evolutionary, and synthetic philosophies, follow in 



354 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

close succession, as nations, politics, and philosophies expand 
and multiply.^ 

Anthropomorphism — God in the image of man — is long 
since dead. Darwin has taught us the divine method of evo- 
lution by natural selection, and De Vries, the discoverer of 
new elementary species by mutation, has supplemented the 
doctrine of the origin of species by inherited small variations. 
Hall has demonstrated that the soul as well as the body is 
immensely old, a silent treasury of forgotten but ineradicable 
pasts. Whole departments have been established in philo- 
sophy, teleology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, metaphysics ; 
and psychology, integrated decades ago, is itself breaking up 
into genetic, physiological, intellectual departments, not long 
hence to be separate sciences. As for physics, matter has 
become force, centres of energy ; and physics (natural philo- 
sophy) has broken into a score of sciences. The early Hel- 
lenic philosophy nurtured every one of these modern sciences, 
from chemistry to sociology and from metaphysics to biology. 

The old idea that it is worth while to know historical 
philosophy that one may appropriate its light for one's 
own pathway has broken down from several causes. 
The mass of it is beyond the powers and opportunities 
of most men to acquire ; the gist of it — the reasons and 
the conclusions — is all necessarily contained in the most 
recent modern philosophy ; the whole needlessly excites 
the soul by reviving what for most of us may well lie 
dead ; and the great questions have all been isolated and 
may be studied in their integrity, freed from the false 
issues of the outgrown past.^ 

What is worth while is familiarity with these ques- 
tions and with their most profitable answers. This famil- 
iarity involves understanding certain terms : materialism, 

^ Cf. Harris, Address, Social Culture in the Form of Education and 
Religion, Congress of Arts and Sciences, St. Louis, 1904. [Rogers, ed.] 
Vol. viii, First Paper. 

2 Cf. Perry, Approach to Philosophy, of which this proposition is the 
thesis. 



PHILOSOPHY 355 

dogmatism, rationalism, idealism, pluralism, monism, 
determinism, reality, matter, force, will, reason, God, ego, 
Nature, voluntarism, morality, good, truth, beauty, love. 
The great questions are : Does God live in and love the 
world ? Am I immortal ? May I become so ? Is will, 
reason, or emotion the dominant quality in God ? in 
man ? What is right ? Does God transcend Nature ? Is 
Nature or the universe God ? ^ Is Nature primarily spir- 
itual or mechanical ? Is it possible to know goodness, 
truth, beauty ? These questions take innumerable forms. 
Can man know anything } Yes, answered Descartes. 
What does this include .? asked Kant. And modern 
Philosophy accepts his answer, which is that man can 
certainly know his own thought. "Nature," says one 
historian of Philosophy, "is an evolution, of which 
infinite Perfection is both the motive force and the 
highest goal."^ 

One who knows this philosophy, understanding the 
reasons for it, has attained almost the highest stage of 
which man is capable. He may not be able to express it 
adequately, perfectly, uniformly in his conduct, because 
practical life seeks but cannot fully realize its ideals ; 
yet he has the possibility of reaching the highest stage. 
This possibility, this desire for perfection, this sense of 
imperfection glorifies the world about him and his own 
life also. As the universe dignifies each star and planet, 
so Philosophy dignifies mind and man. By its philosophy, 
every age stands or falls ; by his philosophy, each man 
reveals himself to those who may understand.^ 

1 *' I have read somewhere that Philosophy has always been chiefly 
engaged with the inter-relations of God, Nature, and Man. The Greeks 
occupied themselves mainly with the relations between God and Nature, 
and dealt with Man separately." The Christian Church thought of God 
and Man and neglected Nature. Modern philosophers think of Man and 
Nature and cannot remember God. Ball, History of Mathematics, p. 281. 

2 Weber, translated by Thilly, History of Philosophy, p. 603. 

3 Cf . Home, Philosophy of Education, p. 281. 



3S6 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

In education and culture, therefore, the true function 
of Philosophy, the motive for its study, is the rationaliz- 
ing of the individual by relating his thought to historical 
and contemporaneous thought, by balancing his idiosyn- 
cracy over against general humanity, by universalizing 
the man in the atmosphere of infinity, eternity, reason- 
able cause, of absolute duty to God, and of rational serv- 
ice to humanity. Thus conscience becomes intelligent, 
energetic, and sensitive; and the will-to-live is justified 
by knowledge of what is worth while and sweetened by 
love of fellow sojourners upon the world, scaffolded by 
time, space, cause, and every other of the present limita- 
tions of the soul in man. 

For the categories of the human mind are in a sense 
limitations as he passes out of ignorance into the light. 
"There is no darkness but ignorance," said Shakespeare.* 
And we are as much puzzled in it as the Egyptians in 
their fog. But because of our effort to see light we can- 
not employ all our energy to see other things and phases 
of this universal world. To direct energy, to withhold its 
dissipation, is to limit it. Thus, the very development of 
our finiteness by directing it to ends fences it in with 
barriers ; as we grow intense we withdraw our extensions 
of reverie, abstractedness, vague longings. The philo- 
sophy of this appears in the theory of education by 
knowledge incorporate in this inquiry into the theory of 
education. Knowledge as such, knowledge consisting of 
items stored in the memory, flitting about in conscious- 
ness, subject to sporadic, spontaneous, undesired recall, 
is of little direct use. In fact, as soon as such items of 
information, as we say, become so disciplined as to be 
of use, they become organized, systematized, and subject 
to intentional recollection. Mere information is one of 
the two "mothers" of interest in the human soul ; the 
other is inherited instinct. It may be that only such 

^ Twelfth Night, Act iv, Scene ii. 



PHILOSOPHY 357 

information as supplies the demand of some instinct 
inherited as taste is found interesting. We may say that 
knowledge functions as interest, and that this function- 
ing of knowledge is its lowest, most elementary mode of 
action. In its passive aspect, such informing knowledge 
is a form of thought ; in its active aspect it is a mode of 
thinking. In respect to this matter, it is perfectly true 
that one may know too much for his own good, for one 
to whom the opportunities have come to observe and to 
read many things may be found in a condition of excess- 
ive mental dissipation. All his thinking will be peri- 
pheral.^ The central consciousness is vague, extense, and 
unillumined. His thoughts radiate outward, not focally. 
In the process of gratification by being supplied with 
facts, interests function as desires, purposes, and judg- 
ments. It is at this point that man discovers his three- 
fold nature, — emotion, conation, and intellection ; heart, 
will, and intellect. All these are but attitudes or disposi- 
tions toward truth. Emotion accepts or believes truth 
and directs it internally ; conation uses truth and exer- 
cises it externally ; intellect confronts truth to know and 
to examine it. Desires and purposes, combining, function 
as motives. Desires and judgments, combining, function 
as ideals. Purposes and judgments, combining, function 
as intentions. Motives, ideals, and intentions, combining, 
function as habits ; and habits, combining, function as 
character. Knowledge, then, functioning in its first 
power as judgment, becomes in its second power an ideal, 
and in its third a habit ; and the habit, functioning 
as the fourth power (as it were) of knowledge, becomes 
the sense of duty or of necessity or of righteousness. 

1 He realizes too little the truth that " in comparison with our know- 
ledge, Being is inexhaustible " (Hoffding, Problems of Philosophy, p. 112), 
and in trying to exhaust the opportunities of learning the facts of Being 
wrecks knowledge itself by accumulating too much and constructing too 
little. 



358 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

Knowledge functions, again, as desire ; becomes inten- 
tion ; becomes habit ; and blossoms as the sense of utility 
or of value or of goodness. Once more, knowledge func- 
tions as purpose ; proceeds to judgment ; is established as 
habit ; and evolves finally as the sense of conduct or of 
decorum or of beauty. Thus by origination and process 
the right, the good, and the beautiful, — the true, the 
kind, the desirable, — derive in due order from know- 
ledge, the form proper to mind, the food by which it 
grows from spirit into reality. 

The sum of one's original instincts is one's tempera- 
ment ; the sum of one's interests is one's disposition. 
Infancy develops instincts and inhibits them ; child- 
hood develops interests and, by absorbing, outgrows 
them ; youth develops desires, purposes, and judgments, 
and forgets them in the higher life of later adolescence, 
in which they reappear strengthened and glorified as 
motives, ideals, and intentions ; maturity develops and 
systematizes habits, and old age summarizes them all as 
character, which is the true expression of wisdom, our 
personal solution of the problems of love and hate, of 
good and evil, the real form of the personal soul. 

For instincts as compared with rationalized habits 
areas shapes compared with forms, and as acts compared 
with processes. Absolutely universal is the mission of 
mechanism ; entirely subordinate to spirit is mechanism ; 
but mechanism by removing obstructing shapes and by 
devising appropriate forms, by inhibiting bad acts and 
disciplining activity until it becomes due process and 
reliable conduct, delivers lawfully the spirit from bondage 
to license and proposes it as an integral, free soul, dis- 
playing character and ready for a better work, a harder 
discipline and, we may hope, a happier life later else- 
where. 



CHAPTER XVII 

HEALTH AND HOLINESS 

So every spirit as it is most pure, 

And hath in it the more of heavenly Hght, 

So it the fairer body doth procure 

To habit it, and it more fairly dight 

With cheerful grace and amiable sight, 

For of the soul the body form doth take. 

Spenser, Hymn in Honor of Beauty. 
If we give more to the flesh than we ought, we nourish an enemy ; if we give not to her 
necessity, we destroy a citizen. -Saint Gregory, Homilies, iii, secund. parte Ezech. 
(Quarles, Emblems., p. 51). 

Mmd makes the man, and our vigor is in our immortal soul. — Ovid, Metamorphoses 
xiii. ' 

Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even 
so to them. — Matthew, Gospel, vii, 12, a saying of Jesus. 

To be hale, healthy, whole is the greatest blessing in 
life. In civilization, health seems to be conditioned by 
intelligence, knowledge, ambition, and morality rather 
than to condition them ; seems to be a result rather than 
primarily a cause. And for two reasons. In civilization, 
many physically unfit persons become parents. And 
civilization seems to wreck the health of very many. It 
is difficult to measure health and healthy persons quan- 
titatively, statistically. 

The truth may perhaps appear upon two investigations, 
one negative, the other by enumeration. 

Whether born healthy or not, in civilization one may 
easily lose one's health because of lack of intelligence, 
as a child, by fault or deficiency of parents, as an adult, 
of one's own motion ; bad or insufficient or irregular 
feeding, darkness of abode or working-place, bad air, 
dampness, excess of alcoholic drinks, or of tobacco, or 
of drugs, or of sexual gratification, deficiency of sleep, 



36o THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

inactivity of body, in short, failure to understand, by 
observation of others and by introspection of one's self, the 
relations of cause and effect. There are in civilized so- 
ciety but few persons who are strong, active, vital, healthy. 
Again, from sheer lack of knowledge, health may be 
wrecked by a single ignorant act or slowly exhausted by 
a series of acts. He who really knows human anatomy, 
physiology, and hygiene and the facts and principles of 
social hygiene, who can realize their truth and is willing 
to observe their lessons, may be able to remain well in 
civilization, which is the city. Even more. Unless born 
deformed or deranged, however weak one may be, one 
may win health, surprisingly good health, by accumulat- 
ing physiological knowledge and obeying its teaching.^ 
Nature means men to be well, strong, and active. But 
one may be intelligent and well informed, and yet weak 
or sickly, or as we often say " morbid," predisposed to 
disease and not combating the idea. It is necessary also 
to desire to be well. Herein the mind controls the 
body ; not, indeed, to the extent of curing serious diseases, 
of healing broken bones, of immediately revolutionizing 
its structure and tissue. But as Nature does all vital 
things, quietly and in order, so does she assist the weak 
to grow well. Though as a race, as communities, as in- 
dividuals, men do ten thousand things to offend the good 
mother of us all, she is still ever ready to forgive, pro- 
vided we repent. The secret of ten thousand thousand 
miraculous "cures" lies in the cells that Nature is al- 
ways glad to build anew, provided the organizing soul 
desires it. To the dipsomaniac, to the sex-pervert, to the 
hypochondriac, to the neurasthenic. Nature says : If 
you will but endure the agony of repentance, I will 
make you whole again. But all these may count for 
naught, — intellect, knowledge, ambition, — for the soul 
of the health of the body is the soul itself : let us call it 

^ e. g. the famous old book, //ow to Get Strong, by Blaikie. 



HEALTH AND HOLINESS 361 

prosaically "sound morals." One may so sin against 
Nature or against man as not to care to get well again in 
this life. Such an one desires surcease of sorrow in 
death. But the immoral do live long and prosper ? A 
few, yes ; but not many. " For the wages of sin is death." 
Man should live to be eighty or a hundred, as we all know. 
But the cemeteries are full of the graves of those who have 
died before their time ; nor do the burial certificates tell 
the truth. In many cases, — shall I say two in three or 
nine in ten .? — instead of " pneumonia," "consumption," 
" brain disease," " cholera infantum," and any other of 
the long and usually tragic list, — for the death of a man, 
like that of the animal, is usually a tragedy,^ — should be 
written " a violation of the law of Nature." The pity of 
these early deaths, which cost the race so much, is that 
so many of them are the results of social rather than of 
personal immorality. They are the effect of the environ- 
ment, the "fates," not the choices of the individuals 
destroyed. 

Perhaps, in the mind of God, all sins are the result of 
such fate. Who is to hold the child of the slum guilty 
when he surrenders to drunkenness and lechery ? Not 
he who never knew the slum. Who is to hold the child 
of the palace guilty when he surrenders to the dissipation 
and too often the sin of the society that bred him ? Not 
he who never knew the palace. Who is to hold the child 
of the country suddenly exiled into the city responsible 
for the unmooring of conduct in that maze which must 
appear to him hysteria ? Not he who never knew the 
exile and the ecstasy. We are not qualified to judge. 
We must, however, examine the record. Perhaps these 
immoralities, at least the personal immoralities, which 
destroy health, life, soul, are in some measure prevent- 
able by personal education. 

We educate for law, for business, for teaching, for 

^ Burroughs, Long, Thompson-Seton all emphasize this fact. 



362 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

" society," for carpentry, for forestry, and for what not, 
save for living. Why not educate for living ? Why not 
educate for healthy physical living ? Why not ? The only 
reason is because wq do not. And this, of course, is no 
reason at all — but a confession. 

The essence of living is health ; but in civilization 
health can seldom be attained or even maintained by 
direct effort. The first prerequisite to health is life itself ; 
and in civilization one receives the means for life only 
by economic effort or by some form of gift from others. 
There are, it is true, many forms of economic effort that 
are directly favorable to health, — farm-labor, teaming, 
tracklaying, indeed, all manner of outdoor work and of 
muscular exertion. But by no means all modes of labor 
are favorable to health. Of the thirty million Amer- 
icans over ten years of age now engaged in "gainful" 
occupations, a very considerable proportion are engaged 
upon such conditions of hours of services or of surround- 
ings or of materials employed as are essentially injurious 
to health. The abnormally high death-rate of mankind 
is sufficient evidence of this.^ And of these thirty mil- 
lion, many are sick persons who, if they work at all, 
should earn a sufficient surplus over bare cost of living 
to enable them to cultivate their health in hours and 
days when not at work. Of this, again, the death-rate 
is evidence that few actually do earn such a surplus. 

In order, therefore, to remain or to become healthy in 
civilization, it is first necessary to obtain a livelihood — 
or, in other words, to find and to hold a place in the eco- 
nomic world, the world of dollars and cents, of payment 
for value received. This fact, this bitter fact of the world 
higher than and remote from primitive communal man- 
kind, this fact of private property, work-for-wages, no- 
service-no-necessaries, work-or-freeze-and-starve-to-death, 

1 Of children condemned to certain kinds of labor, but one in three or 
four survives to manhood, as the unchallenged current statistics show. 



HEALTH AND HOLINESS 363 

may be the power that is driving the race forward by 
compelling effort all along the line ; but nevertheless it 
is the power that hour by hour removes the inv^alid poor 
from the face of the green earth. 

The view that "wealth is the siren that lures labor on " * 
is seen from the vantage-point of those whose food, shelter, 
clothing, and fuel are guaranteed, and is not discovered from 
the vantage-point of the multitudinous proletarians. The man 
who does not need to work for a living often does work for 
wealth ; but he is not the typical man in a civilization wherein 
even the land to live on must be won at a price. Not the food 
lures, but the hunger drives, most men. 

The city school superintendent must necessarily be familiar 
with the procession to the gates of death. Thither go the 
young babe whose parents were too poor to dare to send for 
the two-dollar-a-visit doctor until too late ; the child whose 
bad teeth were extracted to avoid the costly services of the 
dentist ; the child with poor eyes, — run over by car or wagon 
for want of proper glasses ; the worn-out mother of a large 
family dead from underfeeding, undersleeping, overwork, and 
overworry ; the father whose cough ran into consumption be- 
cause he could not leave his indoor work 2 and let his children 
starve, but whose children nevertheless do starve when he is 
gone ; and all the other victims of the competition for employ- 
ment. 

But granted good health at birth and sufficient cloth- 
ing, shelter, and fuel until manhood, in civilization health is 
not yet assured. Many things are necessary to render this 
blessing secure against the forces tending to its destruc- 
tion. Disease is evidence of hygienic sin, not conclusive 
evidence, to be sure, but presumptive. And death before 
old age, unless by accident, is overwhelming evidence. 
For the man who has lived with some regard for the laws 
of Nature may be ill because of a lapse in hygienic 

» Clark, Philosophy of Wealth, p. 25. 

2 Riis, How the Other Half Lives ; Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the 
Children. 



364 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

morals ; yet he will not die. His vital reserve, the bank 
account with which the good Mother endowed him in 
the womb, will meet the draft. But he who has often 
sinned with or without punishment is certain some day 
to overdraw that account. Nature means men to resist 
the microbes of tuberculosis and of pneumonia and the 
acids of rheumatism. The purpose of oxygen and of 
sleep is to burn up waste tissue and to ehminate the 
poisons of fatigue and of infection. He who breathes an 
abundance of good air, drinks enough water to flood his 
system, takes enough exercise to vitalize his tissues, and 
sleeps long enough to clear his body is not likely to 
"die before his time ; " yet most men and women do die 
for want of these simple virtues. 

In respect to health, there is, however, no need of 
experiment, no need of ignorance, no need of hypothet- 
ical theorizing. Consequently, there is no personal excuse 
for hygienic sinfulness unless there is cause beyond per- 
sonal control. For in respect to health, we owe absolute 
obedience to Nature within the limits of our opportun- 
ities and heritage. We owe, therefore, definite consid- 
eration of the facts and principles of physiology, which 
we should study as a science, and of hygiene, which we 
should practice as an art, in order that we may know what 
the commands of Nature are. By such care, we fit our- 
selves to live healthily in the sorry maze of this diflficult 
civilization. But such care only the privileged few may 
exercise. 

To go free in the world, to be able to take in lungfuls 
of air, to enjoy work, care, and even anxiety, to eat with 
good cheer and to sleep in peace, to feel that life is a 
play of the spirit rather than a labor of the flesh, to 
be strong enough, and to dare to look every other human 
being in the eye, to be unafraid in the crowd or in soli- 
tude, to know and to feel, love and pity and reverence : 
this it is to be whole, to be healthy. To achieve this, and 



HEALTH AND HOLINESS 365 

to express it, it is often necessary to undergo a severe 
regimen and even surgical operations in order to correct 
the ills of inheritance and the injuries of poverty in 
childhood and youth. To be willing to undergo these 
remedial measures requires intelligence and character 
beyond most youth. As long as we inherit spinal curva- 
tures, eyes defective in vision or in external muscular 
accommodation, bad teeth or the conditions that produce 
these ; as long as parents persist in drinking too much 
alcohol, or in smoking or chewing too much tobacco, or 
in sexual excess, or in overwork and undersleep ; as long 
as ignorance, fraud, and previous poverty, the three 
causes of all present poverty, endure ; as long as luxury 
ruins the few and poverty injures the many, — so long 
will most children be born too weak in will to win health 
out of their weakness or wickedness or evil fate. But 
some will strive, and a few will succeed. One who has 
transformed invalidism into health is more likely to use 
that health well than another to whom health was 
given. Democracy is founded upon the doctrine that one 
who wins power is far more fit to wield it than one who 
inherits power. So with health. 

But health is not only a matter of body and of will. It 
is also a matter of work, of work exalted to art, of- work 
exulting in strength and skill and become play, the free 
adventure of the spirit creating things or performing 
services. In all ages, labor, work, and service have been 
signs of the menial and degraded, and in all languages, 
the words indicating work, labor, and service have been 
ignominious and irritating ; and for one sole reason, — 
they have designated the life-occupation of persons sub- 
jected to the will of superiors. The tendency of all such 
subjection has been to destroy the health of the body 
and the health of the soul. We have seen this in the 
extreme forms of plantation slavery, of mercenary sol- 
diery, and of feudal serfdom. We see it now in the 



366 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

extreme forms of wage-service in mines, in mills, in stores, 
in packing-houses, and in domestic employment. One of 
the chief purposes of intentional alcoholic intoxication 
and of sexual excess is to feel the ecstasy of relief from 
control by the will of others. This ecstasy mimics the joy 
of true health by causing in the soul a pseudo-euphoria; 
but it costs too dear because it short-circuits the long 
natural winding ascent right up the mountain-side of 
true health. Such as commit these excesses cut their 
way ruthlessly to results and lose all the education of 
passing wholly through each process. They cannot know 
what true manhood and womanhood are, what good life 
really contains and expresses. 

Learning, doing, conduct, truth-seeking, love of beauty, 
and the search for wisdom are but the rungs of a ladder 
whose sides are health and creation. To get better, to 
grow stronger, in such phrases the soul speaks its desire 
for physical health. To imitate things and acts, to initiate, 
to invent, to create, in such phrases in ascending scale 
of aspirations, the soul speaks its desire for spiritual 
health. He is whole who in his originality is independent 
of physical and psychical conditions within himself ; and 
this independence can be secured only by the long train- 
ing that wins through self-mastery. The mastery of the 
world by understanding it, at best but partial, is little 
more than an incident in the process ; as far as it is more 
than an incident, it is only a means. The frame of this 
world passes. Any other world, many another world, let 
us suppose, would serve as well as this in the schooling 
of the living soul. 

As the educated man nears such perfection as is pos- 
sible to the best of human beings, his desire and his 
power to discern and to produce the new and the perfect 
increases rapidly. The roll-call of the immortals, how- 
ever, shows that each failed in greater or less degree 
completely to endure the processes of education and to 



HEALTH AND HOLINESS 367 

conform to its ideals, the greatest failing least, succeeding 
most. 

It is perhaps as fanciful as it is accidental that in this 
text the ideals of education and of culture should appear 
to be seven in number. Ruskin likened seven ideals of 
architecture to seven lamps, after the fashion of the 
seven golden candlesticks seen by Saint John in apo- 
calyptic vision. ^ These seven ideals appear like the seven 
stars of the same vision. We can never attain to them ; 
but we may travel by their light to the desired haven. 
Pure intelligence, entire efficiency, sinless morality, all 
truth, immaterial beauty, errorless wisdom, perfect health : 
to not one of these, by no manner of means to all, may 
any human being attain. And yet by discipline, by un- 
remitting effort, by information ever welcomed, by dream 
and by sacrifice, he may attain to the power to contribute 
something new and worth while in a form or by a mode 
agreeable to his fellow men. At every stage in the pro- 
cess, he may daily in greater or less measure, as he 
nears the goal in ever greater measure, repay to society 
the cost of his life. Not in selfishness or in pride will he 
win to that goal; but only in generous mood and in 
docility may he go forward, remembering that not the 
goal, but the journey, is his reward. 

In this journey, he is seeking the perfection of which 
alone is the finite soul capable, holiness. From the heights 
of modern thought to which some have ascended by 
obeying the Master, it may be clearly seen that body 
and soul, intellect, heart, and will, matter and spirit are, 
for the purposes of the life-journey, of the world-school- 
ing, inseparable. There is no dualism in righteousness. 
The physical life may be stainless, while the soul is 
suffused with passions : the man is unclean, imperfect, 
distraught, unholy. The spirit may be full of kindness 

1 Vide Seven Lamps of Architecture. Also, Osborn, "Seven Factors in 
Education," Educational Reviexv, June, 1906. 



368 THE EVIDENCES OF CULTURE 

toward others and of desire to grow into the light, while 
the body is weighted and warped by many a lust of the 
flesh : the man is unclean, imperfect, distraught, unholy. 
The dull and ignorant intellect blocks the strong will by 
inaoility to perform its purposes and baffles the kindest 
heart by perverting its impulses. The weak will undoes, 
retards, wrecks the plan of the keen intellect and the 
aspiration of the loving heart. One who sees and knows, 
who directs his course and holds to it firmly, may for 
want of affection, loyalty, or sympathy fail of that com- 
pleteness, serenity, sanity which is holiness. These 
qualities, though distinguishable in the process of de- 
velopment, are inseparable in the final result. 

Too long we have thought of health as a mere phys- 
ical desideratum, as something incidental and not abso- 
lutely necessary ; of holiness as a religious ideal, aside 
from the concerns of politics, business, education, culture, 
property, and family. We have allowed ourselves to 
think of holiness as a symptom of senility. True, it flowers 
in middle life and bears fruit in old age. In our best 
moments, we know that all the glory of a long life, the 
visible evidence that it has been well spent, is to wear 
the halo — to develop, as it were from the soul itself, 
the atmosphere — of holiness. 

Of the old man and of the old woman, we love to 
think, we can scarcely prevent ourselves from thinking, 
in this one term, holiness. There is no higher praise 
than the comment, — a hale old man and good, his mind 
filled with pleasant memories, his soul serene with the 
consciousness of temptations resisted, obstacles over- 
come, and victory won. Because we think of the old in 
this one term, there is nothing whatever in all the world 
that so grieves the heart, confuses the intellect, and 
offends the will as to see an old man nearing the veiled 
gates, in decrepitude of body, dullness of intellect, mean, 
vicious, flooded with memories of defeats of the spirit. 



HEALTH AND HOLINESS 369 

Holiness is the character to be won in Hfe by a good will 
toward life ; and, therefore, it is the one highest ideal, 
the final outcome, of education. 

Upon the old man, sitting apart quietly in the aloof- 
ness of old age, there seems to rest the blessedness of 
absolution from sins and sinfulness. Upon him has de- 
scended the last benediction of life, its extreme unction. 
He has made ready to be called away, upon his face is 
written expectancy of the call, and his manner reveals 
peace.* As for us who are younger travelers, we have 
yet to learn the patience and the faith of old age, the 
crowning age of life. We cannot bring ourselves to say 
that old age and death are the best blessings because 
the last ; and yet we know and really believe that they 
are. For every man, we desire long life and a happy old 
age, and death not in sudden torment, but in quiet expira- 
tion of the breath. This desire is the keynote in which 
is pitched the song of our human life. Let me live as 
long as I may live honorably, that I may die regretted, 
but without regrets. The soldier who goes to battle for 
his country, the laborer who goes to work for his family, 
the wife, the teacher, the man of business and all others, 
one and all, offer the same human prayer. 

^ It is time to be old, 
To take in sail : — 
The god of bounds, 
Who sets to seas a shore 
Came to me in his fatal rounds, 
And said, " No more ! " 

As the bird trims her to the gale, 
I trim myself to the storm of time, 
I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime : 
*' Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right onward drive unharmed ; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed." 

Emerson, Terjninus. Cf. Tennyson, Crossing the Bar. 



370 THE EVIDENCE OF CULTURE 

" Grow old along with me ! 
The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made : 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, ' A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half ; trust God : see all, nor be afraid.' " * 

Because life is sacred, death is likewise. The good old 
men and women see this sacredness in all relations and 
walks, of life because they sit apart, conscious that they 
are near the gates of exit. To the toilers, an understand- 
ing is often denied. Life seems the cheapest of all com- 
modities ; and so it may be in the terms of business ; 
but the good old man sees life in all its terms. He sees 
all life clearly, and he sees it whole. Not so with him 
who in old age has his gaze still riveted upon particular 
aims. Such an one becomes peculiarly horrible in his vice, 
whatever it be, — avarice, envy, drunkenness, lechery, 
lying, — and peculiarly pitiable in his weakness, what- 
ever it be, — timidity, invalidism, indecision, vanity, im- 
patience. To us, he seems to have made a failure of life, — 
though he may have won millions or fame or power, he 
has not gathered from life its fruit, which is preparedness 
to live again. Not he who in old age recounts his mis- 
takes and exhausts his little strength in vain regrets, 
not he who boasts of his successes and wears himself out 
in vain mimicry of the efforts of his prime, but he who 
recognizes what is fit, as the pulse runs down and desire 
fails, and deports himself accordingly, honors human 
nature, and by his own life expresses its final glory. 

^ Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra. 



PART FIVE 

MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATIONAL 
PRACTICE 

American scholarship, through its ministry in the universities, 
through its teachings and its teachers, is to remove the evil, to 
instruct the ignorant, to broaden the narrow, to elevate the low, 
and to transmute the brutal into the human, and the human into 
the divine. — Thwing, History of Higher Education in AinericUy 
p. 466. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

HABIT, CHANGE, AND ILLUSIONS OF CHANGE 

The higher the mental grade of the organism and the more varied the conditions of its 
life, the greater is the balance of intelligence remaining beyond the period of youthful 
plasticity for further adaptation in adult life. — Morgan, Habit and Instinct, p. 15S. 

To know the past is a duty; to be in touch with the present, an imperative necessity ; 
to have constantly in mind the future, a privilege that will prove the source at once of 
comfort and of inspiration. — Harper, The Trend in Higher Education : " The Old and 
the New," p. 119. 

Through ages innumerable, we look back over an infinitely slow series of minute ad- 
justments, — material undulations among individual molecules, mental discriminations of 
likenesses and of unlikenesses, — gradually and laboriously increasing the points of con- 
tact between the inner Life and the World environing, until at the critical moment evolu- 
tion shifts to a higher plane and the nascent Human Soul reaches forth toward some- 
thing akin to itself, not in the realm of fleeting phenomena, but in the Eternal Presence 
beyond. An internal adjustment was achieved in correspondence with an Unseen World; 
and man knew his essential kinship with the ever-living God. — Fiske, Through Nature 
to G<?^ (arranged from pp. 33, i88, 191)- 

Habit, change, and illusions of change form the proces- 
sion of the events of conscious life. Habits may be in- 
stinctiv^e and congenital or acquired ; but they are always 
automatic in their operation.^ Changes may be acci- 
dental or voluntary ; they may be either enforced by cir- 
cumstances or originated in the choice of the individual. 
The greatest lives are those at once most controlled by 
choice and furnished with the most habits.^ To acquire 
new habits and to eradicate older habits, which may or 
may not have been useful in their time, is as much the 
purpose of education as to control instinctive activities 
and already established habits. 

"Communities," said Daniel Webster, "are respon- 
sible as well as individuals."^ For communities are free 

^ Morgan, Habit and Instmct, p. 27. 

2 Baldwin, Mental Development, Ethical and Social Interpretations^ 
p. 164. 

3 Vide Bunker Hill Monument^ second oration. 



374 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

to acquire habits, to make changes by choice, and to 
modify their characters in accordance with new truth. 
But the responsibility of the community, though vastly 
greater than that of the individual, is abstract and sec- 
ondary, while that of the individual is primary and con- 
crete. In a material sense, there is no such reality as a 
community : there is only an aggregation of individuals. 
Educating a community, enlightening, benefiting, in- 
forming, directing, degrading, debauching, robbing a 
community : each of these phrases is but a figure of 
speech. Yet within the figure of speech is an idea ; and 
this idea is a reality of the spirit, a reality many times 
stronger than the reaUty of the human body of the indi- 
vidual. 

By " consciousness of kind," to use the phrase of Giddings, 
groups, classes, societies, communities of men are brought 
together to reinforce their sense of likeness and agreement. 
The stranger introduced among associated men and the vari- 
ant born within their number have but the choice, to agree or 
to oppose " the social mind." The history of these agree- 
ments and oppositions is the material for all sociologists, — 
Gumplowicz, Tardes, Le Bon, Spencer, Bosanquet, Giddings. 
This history contains the mechanical explanation of all wars, 
strifes, concords, councils, events, movements, since men first 
dwelt in villages by the ancient mid-earth sea. 

The community moulds the individual even to the 
extent of transforming him into its own image, — unless 
he resists the process. Even so, it moulds him into its 
opposite. Thus, oppression produces the hero from 
among the meek oppressed ; sordidness, the generous 
benefactor from among the sordid ; and every evil and, 
alas ! every good, its opposite. And why ? Because hu- 
manity, seeking completeness and universality, is ready 
for every experiment and for every variation. 

It is useless to try to understand the reason or the 
nature of many things. Before the final problems, the 



HABIT, CHANGE, AND ILLUSIONS OF CHANGE 375 

human mind sinks abashed. Is this universe finite or 
infinite ? If finite, is there an infinity of finite universes ? 
How do other worlds differ from this ? What am I ? 
How does grass grow ? What is evil ? Why does the 
good God permit or cause it ? Is He good ? Is He omni- 
potent ? ^ These and a thousand other questions that 
children ask, and we all ask, are useful only to stir the 
soul from self-content and to enforce the truth that the 
world is a school for education, not for acquiring final 
concrete knowledge. We can no more carry facts into 
the life beyond death than we can carry silver and gold. 

These eternal questions have their greatest value in 
that they are not yet answered : therefore, they serve to 
stir the souls of the millions of each generation. The 
child discovers them ; and wonders. Each new question 
is to him a new mountain-top with vaster outlook upon 
life. Each one of us, over and over again, rediscovers 
them when facing new vistas of experience. In a sense 
it is the same with the petty questions of life that may 
be answered. We think that we have gained new wis- 
dom when very often we did the same thing in the same 
way with the same contentment, last year, ten years ago. 

Before birth, as Lotze remarked half a century ago, there 
proceed astonishing, unaccountable physical changes, — 
recapitulations of the past, vital experiments, outlived 
or abandoned, — whose issue is the new-born babe, 
prepared to live in the air upon the surface of the earth, 
eager to grow in bulk many times and in strength yet 
more, but never to change greatly in any essential feature 
save in that which is to be associated psychically with 
the new birth twelve or fourteen years afterwards. Before 
that new birth of puberty into adolescence, there proceed 

^ God is perfect. The Universe is in progress. Who can resolve this 
antinomy.? God is infinite. Man is finite. Who can reconcile these in- 
commensurate truths,'' C£. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Watson, 
transL), p. 115. 



376 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

other and still more astonishing changes in the soul. 
When we remember that one babe in five is still-born or 
dies within ten days after birth, and that two in five die 
within a year of birth/ we can see how severe Nature's 
first examination is.^ Yet no child of normal mentality 
ever goes insane. Tyler calls adolescence " Nature's sec- 
ond examination." ^ Not only is it accompanied by insan- 
ity, but the entire sex-life, both physical and psychical, 
seems to constitute a predisposition to insanity and to 
suicide. Before adolescence, sex is quiescent, prepotent 
rather than potent, discoverable rather than aggressive. 
Before adolescence, the boy and the girl display racial, 
ancestral, ancient heredities. In adolescence, more imme- 
diate paternal and maternal traits struggle for mastery, 
the boy trying to put off the general human qualities 
and to devote himself to what is typically manly and the 
girl to become womanly. Often it is a battle royal. Of 
the changes proceeding now, few are illusory ; most, 
indeed, are more serious, more recreative, more profound 
than they seem, cutting clean into the marrow of life. 

Stronger than the habits of communities, far stronger 
than the habits of individuals, are the habits of the social 
institutions, which indeed, when cross-sectioned at any 
particular time, appear to be all habits, pure conventions 
without any voluntary intellectual processes. This, too, 
is illusion/ One who imagines that the social institutions 

^ Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children, p. lo, and authorities cited, 
passim. 

2 A test vitiated, of course, by the factor of the economic opportunity 
of the parents to provide food, medicine, nursing, etc., adequately. 

3 Growth ajtd Education. 

4 " Doctrines vanish without a direct assault ; they change in sympathy 
with a change in apparently remote departments of inquiry ; superstitions, 
apparently suppressed, break out anew in slightly modified shapes ; and 
we discover that a phase of thought that we had imagined to involve a 
new departure is but a superficial modification in an old order of ideas." 
Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, p. 3. 



HABIT, CHANGE, AND ILLUSIONS OF CHANGE 377 

are permanent and changeless is deceived as much as 
one who imagines himself a voluntary agent, freely 
choosing and changing his course in life. The working 
doctrines of Property and of Family, the basic theory of 
what the State is and for what it is, the conception of 
what Business may rightly undertake, the very psycho- 
logy of the race changed when a man could no longer 
give his own body as pledge for a debt. These all will 
change again when a man cannot give the homestead of 
his Family as a pledge for debt/ 

For ideas construct, destroy, and reconstruct the 
world. The notion that men are the sons of God and 
therefore equal brothers has overthrown monarchy and 
aristocracy, established democracy, severed Church and 
State, and subordinated religion to politics.^ It will yet 
establish equality of opportunity in economic affairs 
and make education and culture the chief business of 
life. To use the phrases of Lord Acton, it has been " a 
doctrine laden with storm and havoc," and is "the secret 
essence of the Rights of Man and the indestructible soul 
of revolution." It will make impossible starvation in the 
midst of plenty and ignorance in the midst of knowledge.^ 

In its degree, every idea, great and little, is a trans- 

1 Fixing the individual family to the land is the first duty of the State, 
and being fixed to the land somewhere is the first duty of the adult man : 
— propositions that transcend in importance any and all others now being 
considered in civilization. 

2 Acton, T/if Study of History, p. 17. 

3 Such starvation is unknown among savages ; it began with barbar- 
ism. " Labor or starve, though there is abundance for all ; labor for the 
privilege of bread," was the cry of kings and of nobles, founded aristocra- 
cies, monarchies, autocracies, of every kind, founds a possible plutocracy 
now. Our various social institutions are incomplete in number and in 
function because they permit wrongs now that once could not be, — 
social wrongs which show that society is not yet self-conscious and there- 
fore cannot be just. The fancy that strong men will not labor unless 
they must (a contradiction in terms, for strength loves work) is no defense 
of the poverty of children and of the aged, of the invalid and of the ignor- 
ant, no defense, but a confession of the incompleteness of civilization. 



378 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

former of habits and a converter of wills. And yet in 
individuals, in communities, in the institutions of society, 
habits have been, are, and forever will be nearly all of 
life. The human body in its myriad processes, the human 
soul with its fathomless memories, the human crowd with 
its intricate maze of opinions, the social institution with 
as many historical origins as a mighty river has tribu- 
taries and sources, could not be operated from moment 
to moment by independent acts of will. Therefore the 
past lives in the present, and indeed is nearly all of the 
present.^ What we in our pride call **the present," 
''modern times," "the new idea," is but the edge of the 
difference by which the limits of a particular recent past 
and of the now are parted. The sum of these differences 
through the ages is vast. I and my ancestor of ten 
thousand years ago would find our thoughts incommuni- 
cable and one another incomprehensible. I and one who 
has grown in entirely different surroundings from differ- 
ent ancestry may find ourselves complementary and 
agreeable, or we may find ourselves so antagonistic that 
our only relief from the strain of juxtaposition is battle. 
Two likenesses and two differences unite me with and 
divide me from my fellows. What I know and desire 
that he does not know or desire, and what he knows and 
desires that I do not know or desire, set us over against 
one another. The masses of similar knowledge and opin- 
ion and the forces of similar habits and motives bring us 
together. We may associate for mutual help because of 
our differences ; we may collide and struggle ; or we may 
part in peace : but we may never be of one and the same 
mind. 

From the separation of men by differences in ideas, 
this age apparently suffers less than any other because 
of certain of our inventions, of our discoveries, and of 

1 Mitchell, The Past in the Present ; Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child 
Study : Instincts. 



HABIT, CHANGE, AND ILLUSIONS OF CHANGE 379 

our social institutions. Type, press, mail, periodicals, 
books, typewriters, telegraph, telephone, school, library, 
university, theatre, opera, church, lodge, ballot, council, 
legislature, horse, bicycle, automobile, electric railway, 
steam railroad, lecture, mill, factory, mine, store, office 
building, — all conspire to acquaint men with common 
ideas and to train them in common habits. Yet the separa- 
tion is greater in reality than in appearance, because men 
differ from the extreme of many opportunities to get 
knowledge to the extreme of none, and from the extreme 
of surpassing ability applied industriously to great op- 
portunities to the extreme of dullness indifferent to small 
opportunity. In ideas and habits, Caesar differed not more 
from the Roman slave than Grant differed from the 
American slave. 

One man looks out upon the world and sees particular 
things in isolation, sees fragments, not wholes ; another 
looks out and sees the same things in their modern com- 
parative relations to groups, communities, social institu- 
tions, and also in their historical relations, knowing the 
stages and processes and motives by which they have 
come to be what they are. One has all the instincts, in- 
tuitions, innate ideas, categories, grounds of sufficient 
reason that the other has ; but the first exhausts his 
resources in the simpler psychological processes of sen- 
sation, perception, memory, while the other, without 
fatigue, runs all the gamut of thought. The latter un- 
derstands, can stand up under, the burden of knowledge, 
bearing it easily, moving it freely. Such were Kepler, 
Newton, Leibnitz, Comte, Helmholtz, Spencer, Darwin, 
Agassiz. And such, as Plato taught, should be the rulers 
of men, because they are their leaders.^ 

For several reasons, the School does not respond read- 
ily to new truths, is peculiarly conservative of the past, 
is governed by habits that have perhaps been discarded 

1 The Republic ; The Laws. 



38o MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

years ago by adult men living in the modern regions of the 
world. To an exposition of the first reason, the foregoing 
passages of the present chapter have been devoted. 
Every social institution changes slowly, painfully, reluc- 
tantly. Property, Family, Church change even less than 
does the School. Every particular family, church, school 
has its own traditions and customs that give it a charac- 
teristic atmosphere. The new member usually surrenders 
soon to its ideas and sentiments. But the cultural, the 
political, and the economic institutions change more 
freely. The reason is not far to seek. Most of them are 
as yet in the processes of formation ; and, therefore, they 
best display the activities of the modern age. 

In the School, kinesis proceeds slowly because of cer- 
tain characteristics peculiar to it. The School like the 
Protestant Church has passed over into the mood, if not 
the actual control, of women. Even the Catholic Church 
finds most of its workers and active members among 
women. That woman is more conservative than man is 
a commonplace of psychology. Nearly all the actual 
teachers of the classes of pupils of elementary schools 
in the cities, towns, and villages are women. 

The textbook is a factor making for conservatism. 
The history of the pubhcation of new truth is this. It is 
discovered and discussed. Accounts appear in mono- 
graphs. Synthetic minds incorporate in treatises the 
teachings of the monographs. University lecturers study 
the treatises and expound them in their class-rooms. 
Their pedagogical disciples finally present these views 
in practical texts, which the boys and girls study. Even 
in an age of steam-power and of rapid printing, the pro- 
cess takes a generation when no controversy delays the 
progress of the new idea within the schools.^ Sometimes, 
for want of controversy, the new truth is ignored and 
almost forgotten. 

1 Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism^ passim. 



HABIT, CHANGE, AND ILLUSIONS OF CHANGE 381 

Another factor making for the undue preservation of 
the past in the education of the present is the persistence 
of men of average talent and of gentle character in the 
few positions not occupied by women. Though teaching 
is still the most attractive, honorable, and dignified, if 
not the most lucrative, of all the vocations open to 
women, it is by no means so in the case of men. But 
men of average talent and of amiable character are not 
the leaders of the race, the builders of institutions, and 
the reformers of society. 

Still another factor is the undue importance of laymen 
in the political offices that control the public school and 
as patrons of the private school. The layman and the 
laywoman remember their own educational experience 
and, of course, have no adequate knowledge of profes- 
sional progress since they went to school. Sometimes, 
these lay persons are discontented with their own school- 
ing and desire something better for the children of the 
present generation. But these instances are few. Only 
men and women either of unusual natural gifts of mind 
or of later and larger educational advantages ever know 
that the educational processes by which they came to be 
what they are may not be the best possible processes. 
It is as hard for a man to imagine what he would have 
been if he had been instructed by different teachers as 
it is for him to imagine what he would have been if he 
had been born of different parents. He is as incredulous, 
even as scornful, of the one idea as of the other. 

Again, many of the teachers and some of the super- 
visory force are really but lay persons, often without 
even a veneer of professional knowledge. 

Unfortunately, these several factors conspire together, 
— the strong-willed, ill-informed layman confronts the 
lonely, gentle schoolmaster and the crowd of schoolmis- 
tresses and overcomes them often by his very faults. 

Another factor is poverty. Changes in schoolhouse 



382 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

architecture and increase in equipment, changes in text- 
books and additions to grounds-, and improvement and 
enlargement of faculty, cost money. They involve diver- 
sion of wealth from present habitual uses to new uses : 
whether to do this and how best to do this require con- 
sideration, consideration requires time, and the time of 
the lay ruler is worth money, and he refuses to give the 
thought required to understand the situation. 

Apparently, for the maintenance of the past in the 
present and for the shutting-out of the new with the 
blind or necessary continuance of the old, a vicious circle 
has been established. This is certainly true in the case 
of the public school. 



CHAPTER XIX- 

MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 

The first and last and closest trial question to any living creature is : What do you like ? 
Tell me what you like, and I will tell you what you are. — Ruskin, Crown of Wild 
Olive. 

The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that, for Nature herself 
accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou 
hast got by working : the rest is all a hypothesis of knowledge ; a thing to be argued of in 
schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. — 
Carlyle, Essay on Labor, p. 185. 

The natural desire to learn about the things with which one has relationships we call 
interest: it is the signboard pointing the direction in which education must proceed. — 
O'Shha, Education as Adjustment, p. 151 (abridged). 

An enumeration by title of the educational and cul- 
tural subjects and systems of exercises in the schools, 
colleges, and universities would fill many pages of this 
book. Even by groups the list is long, — mathematics, 
languages, histories, athletics, gymnastics, calisthenics, 
literatures, sciences, arts, philosophies. Of modern cul- 
ture, it is not possible for any one to know much : it is too 
vast and profound. It becomes, therefore, perforce desir- 
able to evaluate the various forms and modes of culture 
in order to pursue those which are most profitable. This 
evaluation, however, postulates knowledge of all culture. 
Such knowledge is not merely beyond attainment, but 
beyond aspiration. "I have taken," said Bacon, "all 
learning as my province." No philosopher could say that 
to-day. At most, he says that since the human soul works 
in one way in a certain subject, it must work in the same 
way in all other subjects of the same type. His problem 
is now simplified ; and he must inquire only as to the 
number of types of subjects and exercises, and as to the 
method of the soul in each particular type of subject or 



384 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

exercise. Since the highest ideal of education is to attain 
health of mind and of body, and since health is an ever- 
present need and desideratum, every exercise, study, 
method, device, apparatus, and programme must be eval- 
uated in its terms. • Health lost is death, and health beino- 
lost is disease. Therefore, every tendency toward disease 
must be corrected, and every temptation to it avoided. 
Similarly, since wisdom is an ideal of education, prior to 
health and essential to it, and since wisdom, which flowers 
in philosophy, is an ever-present need and desideratum, 
only less important than health, every study, exercise, 
apparatus, recreation, and interest must be evaluated in 
its terms. Wisdom is relative to tasks and opportun- 
ities. We have seen many a man a sage in a village and 
a fool in a city; careful with dollars, spendthrift with 
thousands ; a good son, a bad father ; clever in conversa- 
tion, absurd in oratory ; loyal as a citizen, traitor as a 
ruler ; useful as a private, dangerous as a general ; com- 
petent as clerk or salesman or mechanic, but soon bank- 
rupt as an employer ; a gratifying success as a student, 
but a total failure as professor or author or educator. 
Our American notion and custom, to promote to ever- 
larger fields, has wrecked many a promising life. The 
right of seniority to the more difficult " higher " task is 
only presumptive, not prescriptive. It is a conclusion of 
sound psychology that talent for great enterprises de- 
velops fast and is therefore recognizable early in life, that 
no man can be too wise for his task, and that only those 
with sufficient surplus of talent succeed upon promotion. 
This conclusion becomes a principle in the making of 
courses of study and of programmes. Similarly, since 
art and science are ideals of education, every study 
must be evaluated in their terms. 

We must not allow ourselves to imagine that there 
is some radical difference between the two groups of 
ideals, — intelligence, efficiency, morality, and science, 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 385 

art, philosophy. Obviously, the first three are qualities. 
Not so obviously but as truly the second three are 
qualities, as also are health and holiness. W^e shall not 
be successful in evaluating studies and exercises until 
this point is clear. 

Science, Art, and Philosophy are not contents, materi- 
als, substantial truths or facts, but qualities of mind. A 
book of science does not contain science, but merely 
such a literary or pictorial record of science as an under- 
standing mind can interpret and an efficient mind use. 
In short, the science in the book or for that matter in 
the laboratory or field is opaque, dead, useless. Other- 
wise, we could make any man a scientist by giving him 
books or tools. Of course, we know that this is utterly 
futile, we know that only a transforming mind can con- 
vert facts and exposition into science. Wherever the 
scientist goes, there goes science, which is nothing more 
or less than the power to observe accurately, to retain, 
to collate, to organize, to relate, and to understand facts 
and principles. Science is a method, not a body of know- 
ledge. Every fact may be tested only to fail, every prin- 
ciple likewise, but science is only the more certain and 
useful. 

Similarly, wherever the artist goes, there art goes. 
This also is method. A picture is not art, but only an ex- 
ample, a manifestation, a testimony of art. Art-products 
waste away ; but the arts endure when the people con- 
tinue to be artists. From this flows many a conclusion 
for the discerning. 

And similarly there is no philosophy in books, though 
by a trope of speech we allow ourselves to say so. But we 
act upon the contrary, for we spend much time and some 
money trying to pass on from philosopher to philosopher 
the living word of philosophy. Otherwise, our professors 
of philosophy should resign their chairs and our thinkers 
cease their expositions ; and we should direct the daily 



386 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

newspapers to reprint Kant and Schopenhauer and Lotze 
and Hall from time to time and to print such new philo- 
sophies as seem expedient, that even the running man 
may read and be wise. 

Science, Art, Philosophy, then, are mental qualities, 
whose development is a motive of the higher education, 
that is to say, of culture/ The notion that some special 
or concrete science or art or philosophy is to be ac- 
quired savors of sectarian theology, completely mistakes 
the catholic, the universal, nature of science, art, and 
philosophy, and, if followed out, ends in the cid de sac 
of authority. Via that route is neither progress nor free- 
dom, but only finality, which is the death of the mind. 

That every study must be evaluated in the terms of 
morality, of efficiency, and of intelligence has long been 
agreed as a matter of common sense. But such evalua- 
tions have been few and casual. 

Observation is the pathway to Intelligence. Not to 
observe is the familiar pitiable condition of the intel- 
lectual idiot, the absolutely confined, private mind. To 
observation. Nature-study, geography, industrial art con- 
tribute freely. In observing, we must measure and count : 
to measuring, geometry contributes, and counting is the 
beginning of arithmetic. Very small children of normal 
mind are keen observers. At five or six years of age 
may properly begin for brief periods daily, but without 
periodic certainty^ the formal training of the powers of 
observation. The fit materials are Nature, Art, and 
Number. But regimentation should not begin so early. 
Children of five years of age should not be required to 
go at a fixed hour daily five days in the week to school, 
with a fixed programme for forty weeks in the year. 
This is no child's garden, but the chain-gang drill, which 

1 " The standards of truth and the methods for its discovery must be 
revealed in and by the process of education." Butler, The Meaning of 
Education, p. 183. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 387 

by interfering with the irregular processes of the phys- 
ical life of the child must stunt his body and stultify his 
mind. It does not follow that the kindergarten should 
be open but every other day in the week, or for mornings 
only. It does not follow that no child should attend for 
three or four hours daily, for (say) an average of four 
days in the week and for forty weeks in the year. But 
it does follow that no child should be required to be 
regular in attendance or to stay in the kindergarten five, 
three, or one hour after he comes. The entire value of 
observation-lessons at five or six years of age depends 
upon the interest aroused and upon their not affecting 
unfavorably the physical life. Such lessons may develop 
oases in the desert of the childish mind. But drill and 
regularity are likely to sweep the sands of the desert 
over every oasis. 

An intelligence, quickened and informed by observa- 
tion, is ready to short-circuit the road to knowledge by 
studying the records of facts in words ; but is not ready 
until so quickened and informed ; and if it is to remain 
quick and substantial, it must constantly observe through- 
out life. The motive in Nature-study is to acquire and 
to keep vital the sense of reality, which the babe does 
not possess at birth. To the infant, the world is 
" Maya," illusion. Under normal conditions, the normal 
infant removes to the gates of Paradise, but not beyond, 
at three or four years of age. The boy and the girl 
pass beyond the gates in adolescence or in early matur- 
ity, if ever. By virtue, they may keep the gates always 
open for return at will. The great restorative of the 
illusion is literature, and this is also the great inter- 
pretative of reality. The man who spends his life with 
books loses the sense of that reality which books can 
only interpret. The mind is quickened and informed by 
reading for its own sake, and by reading for the sake of 
the content to be acquired, — geography, arithmetic, 



388 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

spelling, history, grammar, science. The reading itself 
exercises the powers of observation and of memory, and 
the content read exercises the powers of imagination, of 
apperception, of appreciation, of judgment, and of reason. 
It prepares for and is usually closely followed by such, 
motor-activities as reading aloud, spelling orally or in 
writing, recitations and compositions in history, grammar, 
and science. These are not pure motor-activities, such 
as manual training ^^d drawing, and therefore do not 
appeal so powerfully to the efficiency latent or patent 
and potent in children. 

71ie babe begins to observe soon after birth, and at 
the same time begins to act. By his acts, he learns 
himself in respect to his body. Action is the beginning 
of efficiency. Before work is play ; and after the work 
there should be play again. Not to be able to act, though 
able to observe, is the state of the imbecile. The soul 
needs to express itself in deeds, in things, — that is, in 
services and in production. Here enter games, "busy 
work," plays, saying, reading, and writing words, garden- 
making, tool-using. How the day of the six-year-old 
child should be spent in school, if at school at all, is al- 
ready answered in thousands of schools with too great 
formality for me to add to the prescription. But a few 
things appear certain. Only the exceptionally strong and 
aggressive child should go to school, whether this be 
kindergarten or not, with any regularity ; and none 
should go daily for weeks at a time. Compulsory attend- 
ance for children under nine is sinful, and every law for 
its enforcement daily is sure to ruin the generation 
victimized by it.^ Again, the spirit of the kindergarten 
should prevail in every class until the children are nine 

1 The statement that "a child of six is better off at school than at home 
when the home is poverty-stricken " may be true : but this does not save 
the child ; nor does it save civilization from its sin that any mother can 
be " poverty-stricken." 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 389 

or ten years of age. There are two ideals, — intelligence 
through observation, reading, and expression in language, 
and efficiency through action and service, of which the 
first should control until the tenth year of age. 

" No impression without expression " was once the 
watchword of progressive pedagogy : we know now that 
this was a catchword, deceptive and false to true psycho- 
logy. In larger terms, we know that we may say truth- 
fully that there is much intelligence without efficiency, 
but not the converse. Forever this sequence holds true : 

Intelligence ]> Efficiency ^ Morality. 

Unfortunately, in our schools we have given too little 
attention to the middle term. The motive in all recita- 
tions, exercises, games, compositions, products is not to 
inform or even to develop the intellect, and certainly 
not to get visible, measurable results, and by all means 
not to restrain and to destroy the will, but to give it out- 
let, to develop and to strengthen it. This motive, once 
understood, must transform many of the practices now 
common in American schooling, which term in truth 
has become offensive to many of the discerning, chiefly 
because of its confinement and devolution of the will. 
There is, of course, a certain restriction of the will that 
is merely direction of it and richly profitable ; but 
among such profitable modes of direction should not be 
included imprisoning children for hours at a stretch in 
straitjacket school-desks, drills upon forms and modes 
after the content has been mastered and reasonable facil- 
ity secured, and similar triumphs of the ignorant parsi- 
mony of adults over the natural exuberant vigor of 
children. 

In the sixth year of the child's age, the star of an- 
other and third ideal has appeared above the horizon, 
morality. The little boy and girl at school are trying to 
learn how to live in society. It is true that they have 



390 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

already learned how to live fairly well in the family where 
morality begins in reverence and duty to parents and in 
kindness to brothers and sisters ; but this family moral- 
ity is not self-conscious, while school-morality, in order to 
be moral at all, must be to at least a slight degree intro- 
spective and self-understanding. The morality of pre- 
cept is of but little value ; only the morality of experience 
enlightened by that consideration of the self-conscious 
soul which we call conscience is able to carry itself well 
in the conflicts of the world, in even the little conflicts 
of the school-world of the child. Morality begins, then, 
with thoughtfulness regarding one's duties and relations 
to the world of Nature and of humanity. All this world 
is symbolized, in its mystery and in its certainty alike, 
by the idea of God. From the autocracy of the mother 
or father in the home to the hierarchy of the school is 
a difficult transition for the child. Combined as it is with 
the discovery of a world of strangers, the transition 
often presents situations that baffle the little child. Al- 
ready, however, he has learned not only to obey but also 
''to try to be good," which is the efficient motive in 
all morality. This motive of the will necessitates also 
the intellectual effort to understand what is good and the 
emotional appreciation of the good. Not to rise to this 
motive, not to be evolved sufficiently to will the good, 
is arrest of development in moral idiocy, a condition 
unfortunately too often to be diagnosed in our people 
to-day to warrant contentment with American morals. 
To go out from the home into the school is for the 
child the discovery of a new world of morals, whose two 
great virtues are obedience to teachers and honor among 
mates. The obedience to teachers may develop into im- 
personal duty to laws and ordinances ; and the loyalty 
to comrades may develop into social morality. As the 
years pass, the child grows into the youth by absorbing 
the life of others into his own thought and by directing 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 391 

his own conduct in relation to others. All the morality 
thus acquired is practical ; but the opportunity of the 
child in school does not end with efficient morality but 
extends to theoretical morals. 

Faithfulness in study, deliberate attention to instruc- 
tion, persistent exclusion of the outside interests of the 
moment and of other occasions and relations : these are 
matters not so much of the intellect or even of the heart 
as of the will. To think as directed at school is a moral 
duty. In this sense, he who learns to obey thereby 
learns to command, for such obedience is self-command 
without which to command others is impossible. There 
is, then, a moral principle that constitutes a true school 
motive, — the will must restrain itself sufficiently to wait 
for the light and then to follow it. 

Shut within a room entirely dark and silent, with every 
wall, the ceiling, and the floor black, one is thrown upon 
one's self; it is a moment of mystery and searching. A spot 
of light appears, a sound is heard : how infallibly the eye 
fixes upon the light and will not be drawn away and the ear 
fixes upon the sound and cannot exclude it. As certainly as 
light commands the eye, which is made to see light and for 
nothing else, and as sound commands the ear, which is made 
to hear sound and for nothing else, so certainly does the right 
command the will, the good the heart, the true the intellect. 
But we know what light and sound are ? and we cannot know 
what the right, the good, and the true are ? Who knows the 
essence and the cause of light or of sound ? Verily, even in 
the twentieth century in America, " we see as through a glass 
darkly," and we do not yet know what seeing really is. 

By study and reading and information at school, the 
opportunity is afforded to learn in the concrete manners, 
customs, laws, and morals. Literature, history, and geo- 
graphy are the typical media for conveying these facts. 
The child or youth learns what the world is, what it 
contains, what it expresses. This " world " changes from 



392 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

generation to generation and from land to land, for it is 
a thing of a particular space and of a particular time 
and of the particular person who sees it and of the par- 
ticular mood in which he is at the time when he sees it. 
One motive, then, and a very important motive of these 
several school studies, is to learn morality of one's own 
times. 

In this view, correct spelling is a moral duty. Both in 
its content and in its method, arithmetic teaches right 
and wrong. Legible handwriting becomes a moral obli- 
gation as certainly as rapid handwriting is evidence of 
efficiency. 

The ascent to complete education may be likened to 
a spiral stairway, lit by the lamps of seven ideals, — in- 
telligence, efficiency, morality, science, art, philosophy, 
holiness. Of these lamps, three light the first cycle of 
the pathway, — Intelligence, Efficiency, and Morality, — 
and three light the second cycle, — Science, Art, and Phil- 
.osophy. Far above Intelligence, yet directly above it, 
shines the manyfold brighter light of Science ; above Effi- 
ciency shines Art ; and above Morality, Philosophy. Few 
may breathe the high mountain air of the second cycle. 

The traveler up the ascent has always the light of 
three stars to guide his steps. In the kindergarten. In- 
telligence shines full upon him ; but he sees also the 
rays of Efficiency and of Morality. It is the age of versa- 
tility, of flitting about. To see, to know, to understand 
is the master motive. Play leads to anticipations in which 
the imagination exults. At ten or twelve years of age. 
Efficiency shines in the zenith, bright as the sun. It is 
the age of drill and habituation for accuracy, for effort, 
and for facility. The motive should be a passion for skill. 
The will takes pride in its own voluntary subjection to 
habits. Self-control, won thereby, is the apotheosis of 
will, as wisdom is of intellect. Sixteen is the typical age 
of Morality. The soul has blossomed into life in the sun- 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 393 

shine of society. God is discovered, and duty universal- 
izes what has hitherto been but obedience to special 
persons and their orders and rules. Mere Intelligence 
has ceased to be a desideratum ; but the star of Science 
shines upon the wider horizon. At twenty, the youth has 
risen to the levels of Science and has the visions of Art. 
Age now tells nothing exactly. At twenty-five, even ear- 
lier, the foregleams of Philosophy may be shining ; yet 
the ascent to the high levels of Philosophy is usually but 
slowly won. To here and there one in a land, to now and 
then one in an age, it is given to know holiness ; but the 
white star of this ideal shines for many who may see it 
only afar off. Figures of speech fail ; concrete language 
fails ; general abstract terms fail ; and the very thought 
of man fails to express clearly the hope of perfection. 
As for the method, who is there that knows it ? In the 
merciful providence of the God of all worlds, man has 
been granted a vision beyond his farthest reach, to lead 
him on, forever on. It may well be that whole worlds of 
experience — new senses, new powers of mind, alto- 
gether new tools and objects — are provided in life after 
life ; and there are times when it appears that this must 
be so. As the child's dream of manhood, so may be 
man's dream of holiness, — for saints and other holy men 
have accounted themselves the most unworthy. 

Upon this presentation, the motives and values of the 
conventional studies and exercises in education and cul- 
ture reveal themselves with unwonted simplicity and 
clearness. Certain criticisms suggest themselves. The 
atmosphere becomes more free, the light grows stronger,' 
the view widens. Utilities find their places. Something 
of new meaning confronts us ; and we are awakened out 
of our traditions. It is an old world in a new guise. And 
yet there is really nothing new here. Philosophy has no 
new discoveries. It but harvests and markets the products 
of other efforts ; if possible, of all effort. 



394 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

Why educate ? That the pupil in the school may at- 
tain intelligence, efficiency, morality, science, art, philo- 
sophy, health, and holiness. Why ? Because these are 
the successively higher manifestations of life ; and life 
alone warrants itself, is its own justification. Moreover, 
life is its own method, and to him that hath life is given 
yet more life. How, then, shall we educate ? By setting 
before ourselves and our children, in order, the oppor- 
tunities and materials of life ; by confronting ourselves 
and them with the necessity of exerting their powers of 
life. The school and college do this in orderly fashion : 
education therein is formal. In the world it is informal, 
save in so far as personal genetic physical and psychical 
change and growth formulates the education of every 
man whether he goes to school in his youth or not. The 
school is tempted to claim a great deal that mere growth 
gives. 

The conventional studies and exercises and the studies 
and exercises that should be pursued are not the same. 
A study pursued by one method differs greatly from the 
same study pursued by a decidedly different method. 
Apparently belonging in the field of pedagogy, these 
two matters are of vital interest in educational philosophy 
and concern us here. We may believe that the chief 
end of education is utilitarian : that the youth may earn 
a livelihood and support a family, that certain truth and 
skill may endure in the world, or that the nation shall 
have a sufficiency of workers to maintain its life. Or we 
may believe that the chief end of education is to educate, 
that the youth shall have the most abundant life. We 
sometimes call this end cultural, but it is not that : rather 
it is something that may be properly styled only an end- 
in-itself, for it recognizes that the youth is his own end 
now and must forever be his own end. Life is self- 
sufficient, its own justification ; and the value of each 
individual life depends upon the degree and measure and 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 395 

quality in which it is Ufe. One generation is as sacred 
as another; posterity is not -^ler than ourselves nor 
less noble. The entire chain partakes, link by link, ot 
the divine metal of which it is made and of the divme 
fire by which it is shaped and welded. 

By utility, we measure the conventional studies until 
there dawns upon our minds the sun oi^^e.terr.^\l^nih 
that we exist not for purposes but for life itself. In the 
lieht of this truth, we make new measurements to dis- 
cover that we must fashion once more the formal educa- 
tion of our youth. , ^ .i,,. 
The same general argument holds in respect to the 
methods of our various studies and exercises. The old 
school ideals- to read loudly and briskly to cipher 
accurately and rapidly, to write legibly and handsomely, 
to sing enthusiastically in chorus, to draw true outlmes 
in black and white, to parse correctly, to declaim set 
pieces unabashed, to know the hundred dates of Ameri- 
can history and the thousand places of world-geography, 
to be punctual, persevering, regular, and obedient, and 
perhaps later to learn Latin, algebra, physics, rhetoric 
world-history, and similar desiderata, ideals unfortunately 
attained by but a small portion of school attendants - 
are seen to reflect particular traditions and aspirations 
not organized into a philosophy and essentially incapable 
of reduction to scientific order, relation, and system. Sub- 
jected to our analysis, not one of them rises higher than 
the plane of science, and most of them are upon the 
lower levels of intelligence and efficiency. These ideals 
are not untrue but inadequate. Not one of them has the 
abstract dignity of art and of philosophy, but all are 
weio-hted with the concrete. A motive in each is he 
desrre to appear well in the social world, and the value 
of success is to be well thought of. In this aspect, edu- 
cation is information to dress the naked soul. It is not 
strange, therefore, that many a man and woman, well 



396 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

educated in these respects, has seemed but a shadow 
when measured against some soUd native soul from the 
unschooled back country. 

The true method for any and every study and exer- 
cise is of the same nature as the standard by which 
the content of the philosophically acceptable studies is 
measured and approved. Content and method are for the 
development of the soul stage by stage in intelligence, 
in efficiency, in morality, in science, in art, in philosophy, 
in health and holiness. Consequently, the true method 
is psychological ; being also logical in respect to the sub- 
ject or content only in so far as that material is itself 
truly psychological in its facts, forms, and order. Fantas- 
tic subjects and exercises, that evade or defy psycho- 
logy, do not belong, are not in any sense permissible, in 
formal education. And this is equally true of fantastic 
methods and devices. 

A method is always a way through, a highway (/xcra 
68os). It implies a straight road that reaches some goal. 
It may be defined as a line of orderly procedure to reach 
an end. Says Kant in the " Critique of Pure Reason," 
"Method is procedure according to principle." It is a 
universal procedure, — one for companions, one for all 
men. Method is truth presented in its own fit clarity. 
vStrictly considered, '' true " or '' sound method " is 
a tautological phrase ; and false or ** unsound method " 
is a contradiction in terms. The teacher who has no 
method or so-called " false methods " cannot educate ; 
and a body of knowledge or of practices not yet sub- 
jected to methodological criticism and organization is out 
of place in any educational curriculum, which should in- 
clude only sciences, arts, and philosophy. Methodology 
is simply a phase of psychology. A method is always 
psychological. 

Yet from various causes pseudo-methods abound in 
numberand in injuriousness beyond the limits of this book 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 397 

to record. They tend to destroy themselves, and, though 
constantly replaced, are individually but short-lived. A 
genuine science, art, or philosophy infolds a true method ; 
and its method expresses its content of truth. The his- 
torical culture of mankind already includes an ampli- 
tude of methodized subjects for use in formal education. 
For the purposes of systematic information and disci- 
pline, the School and the College suffer from a profusion 
of scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical riches. He who 
knows a few perfect tools is an artist far superior in his 
achievements to one who uses many tools unskillfully. 
Too many tools are confusing. 

The science of language is grammar, its art rhetoric. 
Magical language, expressing truth, beauty, goodness, 
wisdom, in the " necessary words," to quote the phrase of 
Kipling, is literature. Language and literature, — that 
is, grammar and rhetoric, in themselves, and truth, 
beauty, and goodness expressed in the modes and forms 
of grammar and rhetoric, constitute the most important 
tools in education. The chief output of the human mind, 
they are its largest expression. In its highest form, the 
art of poetry, literature becomes a medium of philosophy 
and of religion. Mastery of language and familiarity 
with literature, indissolubly one, is the first essential, the 
typical and most prominent formal and objectively appar- 
ent characteristic of a well-educated person. Of all the 
subjects used in systematic education, language and liter- 
ature, giving content to the mind and voice to the soul, 
afford the widest range of material. They feed the intel- 
ligence of the child, stir him to efficiency, instruct and 
discipline him in morals. They are the medium for the 
propaganda of science; the indispensable mode and form 
for receiving and giving forth the products of the arts of 
oratory, poetry, prose, allying themselves to music with 
almost perfect intimacy ; and reservoir and conduit of 
every kind of spiritual truth. It may not be said at what 



398 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

Stage language and literature most closely knit them- 
selves to education ; but it may be said that they are too 
much neglected at every stage, for neither is that child 
advanced in intelligence who cannot read and talk well 
nor is that adult scholar wise who despises the art of 
expressing thought in words. 

The motive for the study of language, oral and writ- 
ten, is the desire to enter into the real, substantial, 
spiritual life of humanity, to know the divine in man, to 
feel and to express the soul. The unlettered child gazes 
at the printed word and feels that it conceals yet adver- 
tises a world at once mysterious to himself and precious 
to his elders ; and altogether infinitely desirable, as in- 
deed it is. In his earliest infancy, he had listened with 
equal eagerness to the sounds of human voices. In his 
latest age, his last conscious desire is the desire to know 
the meaning of words, to find the thought that others 
are expressing in them, and to express his own thought. 
He who acquires words afterwards thinks in them for- 
ever. They are the links of thought. 

In importance the sound of words far exceeds their 
appearance in letters, written or printed. Phonics concern 
not merely the child in his effort to pronounce words, 
to associate their signs with their sounds ; they con- 
cern also every one who converses, who writes prose, 
who composes verse, and who reads prose and verse. 
Our insensitiveness to the power and charm of good 
language, in particular of good English, is due largely 
to deafness to phonics, which in turn is due to our 
neglect of reading, conversation, and oratorical com- 
position as arts, the supreme arts by which men relate 
themselves in thought to one another. The length, 
breadth, force, and tone of the vowels, the sharpness, 
smoothness, and intensity of the consonants, the coales- 
cence of diphthongs, alliteration, and rhyme, meter and 
scansion, rate and variety of movement of syllables, of 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 399 

words, of phrases, of clauses, of sentences, and of para- 
graphs, are one and all matters of no small concern to 
those who would convey and receive thought in its 
purity. 

This thesis requires no demonstration. Two men 
may speak the same truth with equal logic ; but if one 
be an artist in phonics and the other not, we listen to 
the first alone. In their degrees, all men are skillful or 
ignorant in making and in hearing the music of words. 
To Milton in poetry and to Webster in oratory, language 
was of organ-tones : to Shakespeare, it was orchestral. 
In Whitman, we hear the booming of the drum, in 
Wendell Phillips and in Tennyson the melody of the 
violin. In this poetic passage, the words by their sounds 
suggest time and travel, — 

"Across birth's hidden harbour bar, 
Past youth where shoreward shallows are, 

Through age that drives on toward the red 
Vast void of sunset hailed from far, 

To the equal waters of the dead ; 
Save his own soul he hath no star, 

And sinks, except his own soul guide, 

Helmless in middle turn of tide. " * 

Contrast Vv^ith these soothing lines, expressing per- 
fectly the democracy of death, the individualism of life, 
the shocking sound of the speech of the wanton man- 
in-the-street who declares, " We 've got to go it alone 
through life. It 's all the same in death for the man 
who made good and for the man who welched." The 
poet sings, the uncouth philosopher screeches. Each mes- 
sage has the same weight and is apparently of the same 
value : but examined, the one is gold, the other brass. 
Our own poet Lowell was characteristically too much in 
earnest to pause for choosing the perfect word, and failed, 

^ Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise, p. 7. 



400 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

therefore, to attain the heights of supreme art in verse. 
The famous Hues 

" New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes ancient good 

uncouth ; 
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of 

Truth," 

are cacophonous with their difficult vowels and numerous 
dentals and sibilants. Keats, Poe,,Tennyson, or Swinburne 
loved their art too well to pass such lines. ^ 

In language, we are concerned not only with the 
phonics but also with the associations of words. The 
Constitution of the United States has been styled the 
magna carta of our liberties. This means something to 
one who knows American history, colonial and national : 
but it means vastly more, intensely more to one who 
knows English, mediaeval, and Roman history and law 
and comparative politics, because the words constitution, 
state, charter, liberty are keys to rich storehouses of 
knowledge. The artist in words knows how by choosing 
the right word to suggest outlines and colors for pictures 
to be composed by the imagination of the reader. The 
power of words is partly the power of their sounds, 
partly the weight of history and literature that they 
carry. What reader of the "Scarlet Letter" can ever 
again see that branded letter without thinking of Arthur 
Dimmesdale and of Hester .? As Emerson and Trench 
and many others have pointed out, a word is often a 
poem, an immortal product of the creative imagination. 

1 Among several famous passages that challenge the world for supreme 
beauty, this may well be quoted : — 

" It was the lark, the herald of the morn, 
No nightingale : look, love, what envious streaks 
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east : 
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops." 

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, iii, v. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 401 

The very word " poem " is itself an island in the cur- 
rent of historical philology. 

And there is a fitness of the word to the idea that is 
apart from its phonics, from its historical and literary 
associations, and from its philology. The power to fit 
words to ideas is the hallmark of genius; it immortalizes 
men ; it decides the crises of nations ; it is the soul of 
literature. The fit word delights every one; it is so 
obvious, after it has been discovered and attached to 
the idea. The skill that finds this word seems a special 
gift of God : fiat hix. And we stand and marvel at the 
sudden shining of the light. 

Grammar is to language what the intellect is to man. 
The motive for the study of grammar is a subordinate 
mode of the motive for the study of language and of 
literature. It is the desire to follow the process by which 
one's fellow men express themselves in language and to 
acquire skill in expressing one's self so accurately as to 
be understood by them with certainty. It is a social con- 
vention to call a particular kind of objects "food" and 
a particular kind of action " giving ; " but it is necessary 
to follow these conventions in order to be understood 
when one says or hears, " the good man gives food to the 
hungry without asking whether or not they deserve to 
be hungry." ^ Similarly, it is social convention of several 
centuries that has constituted such a succession of words 
as grammar. To defy, to ignore, and not to know the 
conventions or principles of grammar are respectively 
immoral, insolent, and unfortunate. 

The study of grammar belongs at a definite stage in 
the process of formal education. The ungrammatical 
may be intelligent and somewhat efficient ; but they 
may never be wholly moral in the broadest sense of 
that term. They can never be, in any ordinary under- 
standing of the term, scientific. The age devoted to the 

1 Jesus, Matthew, Gospel, vii, i ; xxv, 31-46. 



402 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

development of efficiency and morality is from ten to six- 
teen ; and it is in the latter half of this period that the 
systematic study of grammar properly belongs. Because 
grammar is a science, — a science indispensable to all 
other sciences, since we must think in words, if we are 
to cover much ground, — its study should be continued 
into the scientific period after sixteen years of age. 

Higher than the science of grammar are the arts of 
rhetoric and poetry. To these, few ever attain. The imi- 
tative impulses of human youth often suggest the writing 
of essays, of stories, and of verses, and the effort of 
public debate ; but it is not difficult to discern whether 
the product is or is not the preface to genuine art. The 
child or youth with the capacity to become an artist in 
words will set his own exercises and revise them for his 
own satisfaction : he will display initiative and conscience. 
For, in truth, there is nothing more false than to suppose 
that the motive of the literary art is self-exhibition. 
After that regeneration into the poetic artist, which 
Sterling pronounced necessary to the completion of the 
born poet,^ he may desire that his expressed art-product 
be highly valued by his fellow men (for even Art is hu- 
man) ; but no true artist ever produced a work primarily 
that it might be seen of men, — wherein Art manifests 
the modesty of religion. In its essence, every work of 
Art is self-caused: the great poem must be sung; the 
perfect statue must be carved ; a living idea seeks a body 
and form in every art-product. 

By art, the seed of an idea quickens into beauty. 

Language, however, serves mankind beyond the ranges 
of science and of art. Wherever thought moves, there 
language seeks to move, for it is " the picture and 
counterpart of thought," as Mark Hopkins declared."' 
Without language, philosophy itself were not merely 

1 Essays and Talcs : Thoiif^hts and Images. 
^ Williston Seminary, Speech, 1841. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 4^3 

dumb, but must halt in painful vagueness and isolation 
in the mind of each several philosopher. Deprived 
of history and of conference, philosophy would wither 
and die. Poetry tries language sorely, hammers and 
exhausts it, finally compels it to shelter and enthrone 
truth in beauty ; but Philosophy does more. Philosophy 
requires language to image shadowy ideas and distant 
ideals, to run as swiftly and as surely as reason itself, 
and to deliver at the goal every part of the strange 
message. Fossil, crystal, mechanic, traditional, final, 
though language apparently is, Philosophy asks of it the 
flexibility, resourcefulness, vitality of living thought. 
And language wins its greatest victory in becoming the 
medium of that highest literature, which is Philosophy. 
In endeavoring to express the supreme ideal of mankind, 
language fails. Words cannot deliver or contain the full 
meaning of the revelation of righteousness, holiness, 
freedom, health, genius, perfection. By acts, Jesus ex- 
presses that ideal in love, which is the nature of God. 
For all the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, the 
Gospel was told not in words, but upon Calvary. 

By language, we must understand all language, not .only 
our native tongue. Indeed, it is by a variety of languages, and 
similarly in a variety of literatures, that man discovers his 
larger self in many individuals and societies, ancient and 
modern, neighboring and remote. The motive is removal to 
a different point of view ; and the values are two : that one 
learns new, different, and often strange facts, principles, and 
sentiments, and thereby enlarges himself ; and that one com- 
pares the old and the new, correlates ideas, cross-sections 
life, and thereby reviews and corrects himself. One ancient 
language, Latin, and one foreign language, German, mastered 
in their literatures, fill, develop, enlarge, and re-create the 
mind not by addition merely, not even as it were by multi- 
plication, but by a subtle geometrical progression. Not sur- 
prising therefore, is polyglottism, when Greek follows Latin 



404 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

and Hebrew Greek, and French follows German, and Spanish, 
Italian, Russian follow French. If their literatures justified it, 
tens of thousands to-day would be studying Japanese and 
Chinese. For the permanence of Occidental morality, it is well 
that Oriental literatures are formal, superficial, artificial, and 
monotonous. 

In educational value, the mathematics are only less 
important than the languages. Number, which counts 
things, is an indispensable tool of the active intelligence, 
— a tool used almost as early as the noun, which names 
things. The operation of numbers promotes efficiency. 
Arithmetic with its system of commercial and industrial 
applications is a highroad through the maze of social 
morals. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, qua- 
ternions, dynamics, mechanics, statistics, and their cor- 
relates and extensions are the very forms of science and 
the modes of Art. And mathematics ends by founding 
in Philosophy the certitude that man seeks in the flux 
and illusion of spatial, temporal, and sequential affairs. 
As Descartes and Kant showed, mathematics is the 
TTov OTTO) of metaphysics. 

Therefore, in a scientific age that seriously tries to 
evaluate and to utilize most advantageously the intellect- 
ual and moral resources of mankind, it is not strange that 
in government, in business, in education, the place of 
mathematics steadily grows. Essentially one of the sci- 
ences, it is so much more important than any other as to 
be classified apart popularly from all the others. Because 
as a science it is the basis of many others, such as physics 
and astronomy, in formal instruction we approach it first 
as a highroad into all science ; but we fail to note that 
the desirableness of a special kind of knowledge and 
the feasibility of attaining it are by no means synchronous 
in psychical genetics. All education since its beginning 
has gone astray, and most education for centuries to come 
will go astray, wandering far from the path that with 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 405 

certainty leads to perfection, wandering into sloughs and 
quicksands and upon barren hillsides, and losing most of 
the wanderers because of ignorance of the genetic order of 
mental functions. The nascent period of interest in the 
science of mathematics is not so early as most courses 
of study subsume. In childhood, we may learn many 
items of mathematics and drill ourselves in many pro- 
cesses; but the science and the art belong to youth. 
The information and the processes are matters of in- 
telligence, efficiency, morality, for want of which many 
a man has served time in jail and penitentiary and 
many times more become parasite or vagabond ; but the 
science and the art are not the avenues of approach for 
mathematics, but goals not visible before fourteen or 
fifteen years of age. For want of understanding this 
principle, school-children are set to work upon a special 
division of mathematics, the science of arithmetic, when 
they should be working on the elementary factors of all 
mathematics, which are number, magnitude, mechanical 
computation, observation, and invention. Indeed, our 
position in respect to the mathematics of the elementary 
school has been the illogical one of anticipating method 
before we have a content, and of anticipating science and 
art before we have facts and processes. 

In mathematics, like children, we havie expected re- 
sults before inaugurating causes. Before the brain con- 
volutions were entirely formed and long before the brain 
tissue has developed its organization, we have expected 
perfect habits of observing, of measuring, of computing, 
and of recording. We have supposed that efficiency 
comes forward pari passti with intelligence, as though 
whatever one understands one can do ! We have in- 
sisted that correct figuring is a matter of morality, as it 
is, indeed, but only for those capable of uniformly cor- 
rect figuring or, in other words, not for young children. 
Intimidated by the commercial forces that now rule 



4o6 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

Western civilization and will ruin it, unless successfully 
resisted soon, educators attempt the impossible and in 
the attempt destroy the material upon which they work. 
Fortunately, W^estern civilization is not uniformly and 
perfectly accomplished everywhere in Europe and the 
Americas, and also, fortunately, childhood itself some- 
times successfully resists ; but '' dropping out of school," 
the sad death-roll of education, is not the recovery of 
freedom to grow in the way Nature intends, but renun- 
ciation of the hope of attaining culture in the way man 
should intend for all. 

The motive for th-e study of mathematics is insight 
into the nature of the universe. Stars and strata, heat 
and electricity, the laws and processes of becoming and 
of being, incorporate mathematical truths. If language 
imitates the voice of the Creator, revealing His heart, 
mathematics discloses His intellect, repeating the story 
of how things came into being. And the value of math- 
ematics, appealing as it does to our energy and to our 
honor, to our desire to know the truth and thereby to 
live as of right in the household of God, is that it estab- 
lishes us in larger and larger certainties. As literature 
develops emotion, understanding, and sympathy, so math- 
ematics develops observation, imagination, the reason. 

What is history ? According to our answer, its place 
in education is fixed. Is it, as its philology suggests, 
truth determined by investigation ? ^ Is it a fable cun- 
ningly agreed upon, as Voltaire said ? Is it philosophy 
teaching by examples, as Dionysius held } Is it a pag- 
eant, as Birrell would have us believe ? ^ Is it a record of 
progress, as proposed by German philosophers, — in par- 
ticular, of freedom, as Hegel endeavored to show.? Was 
Carlyle right in calling biography " the only true his- 
tory " ? Was Gibbon partly blind when he pronounced it 
" little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and 

1 laTwpla, a learning by inquiry. ^ Oditer Dicta, ii : Muse of History. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 407 

misfortunes of mankind " ? Is it a science, as a modern 
school of historians would have us think ? Is it, as 
Macaulay declared, *' a compound of poetry and philo- 
sophy " ? ^ Shelley called it ** a cyclic poem."^ Freeman 
asserted that it is "past politics." Seeley says it is a 
*' residuum" after all the sciences have been abstracted 
from the total of human knowledge.^ History has been 
styled "a thesaurus of the facts and opinions of the 
past," " a record of events that have affected the gen- 
eral welfare,"^ "an interpretation of the social forces 
and movements," ^ "a probably true prose narrative of 
past events," *' a record of exceptional phenomena," ^ or 
** everything that Nature is not." '^ 

Claimed by literature, by philosophy, and by science, 
each denying the claims of the others, history is in some 
danger of being accounted but the rubbish-heap of the 
past, the debris of civilization. From Adams who pro- 
nounces it " the highest form of prose literature " to the 
scientific school in Europe and in America that proclaims 
it an accumulation of proven facts is indeed a very dif- 
ferent direction from that by which we reach the scorn- 
ers who reject history utterly ; but, for educational pur- 
poses in the elementary schools, the one journey is as 
fatal as the other. If history is a science, it certainly 
does not belong in courses for children under fifteen 
years of age. If it is cunning fable, it belongs nowhere 
in education or in culture. "The past," however, says 
Lord Acton, " burdens, but knowledge of the past eman- 
cipates, us."® As a matter of common sense, we are 
likely to agree that history is not science, but a record 

1 Essays : Hallani's Constihitional History. 

2 Also Acton, Study of History. 

3 Introduction to Political Science. 

* Chancellor, The United States : A History, vol. i. 

5 Mace, Method in History. ^ Ward, Applied Sociology., p. 234. 

■^ Droysen, Principles of History (translated by Andrews). 

^ Study of History, p. 17. 



4o8 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

and an interpretation of the materials of many sciences. 
One who has read Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Macau- 
lay, and Parkman is not Ukely to dispute the proposition 
that the best history is at least fair literature. 

Accepting these debatable premises, educators are 
likely to find a place in the school curriculum for history, 
with literature upon one side and geography upon the 
other. But this place, let it be clearly understood, is for 
history as a systematic literary account of the past of 
mankind upon earth, not for history as a science and not 
for it as a polemic, a fable, or a collection of ollapodrida. 
Three principles that must be regarded in every method 
of history teaching are the time-perspective, the sequence 
of events, especially cause, crisis (issue), and result, and 
the milieu (environment, atmosphere, circumstance). 
The foci of interest for children in history are biography 
and action, and the ellipse evolved is drama or epic. 

In the light of this discussion, it becomes clear that 
with history as such children have no concern until so- 
cial morality begins to mean something to them. It is 
an advanced grammar-grade study for children not under 
thirteen years of age. The locus of real history is far 
above Morality, Science, and even Art, for history needs 
the light of Philosophy, and its method is not syllogistic 
or inductive or aesthetic, but dialectic, and its concern is 
with all the life of all mankind. More near the truth 
is it to say that history is at once a science, an art, and 
a philosophy ; in other words, literature of the highest 
kind, that is derived from a science as exact as the ma- 
terials permit to an art limited in its activity and range 
only by conviction of the truth, an art without fiction, 
portraying fact to its best advantage. 

" History is Humanity's knowledge of itself, its cer- 
tainty about itself, a search for light and truth, a ser- 
mon thereupon, and a consecration thereto." ^ But this 

1 Droysen, Principles of History, p. 49. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 409 

consecration is not purely or even mainly academic, as is 
that of philosophy, but it is practical, manifesting itself 
in councils of politics, in the battles on land and sea, in 
the factories and upon the farms of industry, — wherever 
men congregate and, by colliding, produce events. 

The ego of the individual is poor, indeed ; history is 
the way of escape out of that poverty. Whether we 
mean by history the real action in the material world or 
the written record, the historical motive is the same, 
to achieve oneness with humanity. The values of histor- 
ical studies for those able to pursue them with under- 
standing are two, — history lifts to ever wider horizons, 
and history persuades to action, while equipping the 
actor with wisdom how and when to act. 

The data of the sciences may interest and concern the 
child ; but the sciences themselves only frighten and 
worry him. Certain great intuitions, Space, Time, and 
Unvaried Sequence ("Cause and Effect"), he may sus- 
pect or even discover; but their manifoldness, their pos- 
sibilities of discrete content, and their nature are beyond 
his vision. Ideas familiar as the light of common day to 
mature philosophers are not credible to him, not com- 
prehensible, not visible, not conceivable, not even pos- 
sible. This is not merely because the intermediating 
words are outside of his vocabulary, not merely because 
his sensations and cognitions are not yet the themes of 
his reflection, but it is because as yet he does not reflect, 
does not even construct in his imagination, and does not 
pause to inhibit and to consider. His sensational and 
emotional experiences proceed in constant succession 
without breaks, and thus fill his mind, overflow it, indeed. 
No day is so long as the day of the child ; no man sees 
and "thinks," desires and feels, so many things. His 
mind, could an adult see it, would appear to be a chaos 
of business with accidental and not logical results. Simi- 
larly, the mind of the trained and educated adult would 



410 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

appear to the child a mesh of tracks and signals, a be- 
wilderment of mechanisms. As a garden run wild com- 
pares with a closely built city of streets and houses, so 
does the childish mind compare with the adult ; the 
one teems and booms with life, the other is packed and 
agitated with things. 

In a certain sense, order is the badge of senility, in that 
when one no longer generates ideas in profusion, he has 
time and feels an interest to husband the ideas that he 
has. Virile youth is too busy to fall a prey to habits. To 
the logical man of talents, matured and trained, all 
genius, whether of childhood or of manhood, appears 
dissipated, accidental, irrational, unnecessary, natural, 
without merit, and perilous to itself and dangerous to 
others, because genius is childishly profuse and careless. 
There are two kinds of precocity : one is early senil- 
ity, the other is genius, and both threaten an untimely 
doom. 

From all these considerations, one seems compelled to 
conclude that the sciences as such are not for the ele- 
mentary school years. But equally it follows that child- 
hood has a right to the materials of all the sciences. The 
birthplace and early home of every child should be in or 
near the open country, — field, forest, valley, wood, sky, 
air, water, birds, stones, flowers, beasts, bugs, sounds, 
smells, running, swimming, playing, hunting, fishing, 
working belong to childhood of immemorial right, nay, of 
everlasting right, since living creatures, our ancestors, first 
moved upon the lands or in the waters of the earth. The 
civilization of the city is a modern, shameless, unnoticed, 
malignant fraud upon childhood ; seen in its true light, 
persisted in after its recognition as a fraud, the city ap- 
pears malicious and dangerous. The city has properly 
three functions and three only : as exchange of goods, as 
treasury of the arts, and as headquarters of government. 
Every other function of man in society — rearing of 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 411 

children, worship, education, manufacture, mining — be- 
longs in the village or in the open country. History is 
a panorama that displays the destruction of peoples by 
their swarming in cities where the soul and the flesh of 
childhood bleach out, and where men and women fall 
afoul of one another and perish at once from luxury and 
from poverty, from crowding and from solitude, from 
overwork and from want of work. Of course, the city is 
not entirely bad ; but the greater it is, the worse it is, 
from which one may not fail to see the conclusion. 
Twenty-two run together : it is football. A million : and 
it is stampede and slaughter. 

For the child of the city, a mimic reproduction, a mu- 
seum collection of the products of field and forest and 
shore, is as essential as are playground and gymnasium. 
These materials must furnish the data for all the sciences 
to come later, — for physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, 
biology, physiology, hygiene, anatomy, histology, ecology, 
entomology, anthropology, ethnology, mineralogy, geo- 
logy, meteorology, astronomy, physiography, domestic 
and political economics, sociology, philology, govern- 
ment, statistics. Such a museum, as it were, may be 
afforded in connection with so-called Nature-study, with 
the pseudo-science of geography, and with the various 
subjects included in manual training. It must be no 
drawerful of things, or mere cabinet collection or wall 
decoration for assembly room or for hallway ; but an 
ever-changing, ever-growing, constantly overflowing ac- 
cumulation of every manner of things " animal, mineral, 
and vegetable." ^ 

1 This will cost money? Probably. In 1905, cigars cost American men 
^300,000,000 ; all forms of tobacco, $745,000,000. Pianos cost $50,000,000. 
Alcoholic drinks cost $1,550,000,000. School-books for 17,500,000 pupils 
cost $12,000,000; school supplies, $6,000,000. The army and navy cost 
$185,000,000, not including pensions, — $145,000,000 more. All forms of 
public and private education cost $290,000,000. 



412 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

The motive for the study of the things of the real 
world, the data of science, is to know into what environ- 
ment one has come " out of the everywhere into the 
here." Incidentally, such knowledge has two values : it 
promotes skill in self-preservation ; and it lays founda- 
tions for later science. But its substantial value is in 
itself, for knowledge is, indeed, the furniture of the mind, 
which without knowledge is the bare habitation of every 
echoing, turbulent, destructive instinct and passion from 
all past ages. As Froude said, *' Ignorance is the do- 
minion of absurdity." ^ 

Of the arts, their inappropriateness in the formal 
education of children is even more apparent than is the 
inappropriateness of the sciences. Our conclusion will be 
the same whether we accept the opinion of Mill that Art is 
based upon Science, or the more common opinion of such 
as Karslake that Science is higher than Art. Said Mill, 
"Art necessarily presupposes knowledge. In any but its 
infant state, Art presupposes scientific knowledge : and 
if every art does not bear the name of a science, it is only 
because several sciences are often necessary to form the 
groundwork of a single art." ^ Such an opinion, of course, 
subsumes certain definitions of Science and of Art. Mill 
had in mind clearly two grades of Art, for he expressed 
the dialectic that what Art does, Science collates and in- 
terprets, and then Art (higher Art, true Art), mastering 
the interpretation, produces with certainty. And he 
declared that Art selects for its rules the theorems of 
Science. The order of the rules of Art is by no means 
the order of the theorems of Science, for their use is 
entirely different. In the reason for the difference in 
their order lies the superiority of Art to Science. Art 
aims to produce perfection, to improve Nature, to create 
particular things that suggest universal principles. Art 

1 Short Studies : Party Politics . 

2 John Stuart Mill, System of Logic ^ Introduction. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 413 

is objective in its motive, subjective in its method. 
Science aims to derive from given particulars universal 
laws, to discover Nature, to know the imperfect. Science 
is subjective in its motive, desiring its own completeness, 
but objective in its method, living in the external world 
of reality. As self-direction is higher than self-conscious- 
ness, which is the highest reach of the highest science, 
psychology, so Art is higher than Science. But the Art 
of which this is true is not the mere art of doing. 

There are many arts, — the fine arts, the appHed arts, 
the mechanic arts, we say, but appropriate terms of 
grouping and of classification soon fail. We may group 
the sciences as exact, e. g. mathematics; as physical, 
e. g. chemistry ; and as natural, e. g. biology ; and feel 
that the grouping is fairly satisfactory.^ But so much 
more elaborate are the arts than the sciences, and so 
much more numerous, that any grouping simple enough 
to serve a philosophical purpose is not distinct and com- 
plete enough to be absolutely true. In the manifoldness 
of modern civilization, the arts are multiplied. In music, 
which is itself an art, there are many coordinate arts, 
as of singing, of song-writing, of composition, of orches- 
tration, of playing upon violin, upon flute, upon the 
organ ; in painting, there are several arts ; sculpture 
likewise ; literature has poetry and prose, and both poetry 
and prose have several arts ; statesmanship is an art, 
concerned with many particular arts, public and private ; 
and teaching, learning ; dancing, swimming ; carpentry, 
iron-working, farming, gardening, tree-growing ; preach- 
ing ; journalism, editing; telegraphy, typewriting, book- 
keeping; medicine, surgery, dentistry — these all are 
arts, but they are only a few of the many differing arts. 

When we reflect upon the sciences and upon the arts, 
and consider them in reference to ourselves and to others, 
we discover an important fact : that no scientist and no 

^ Cf. Duncan, The New Knowledge (asserting the atom as all in all). 



414 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

artist in these times comprehends or understands or 
scarcely appreciates the sum totals that we mean by 
Science and by Art.^ Living humanity does not contain 
them, though possessing means of access to most of their 
truths and practices. For Science and Art are stored in 
books, in things, in the minds of millions of different men. 
They are the subject of oral traditions and of practical 
"object-lessons." Humanity, Science, Art: these are 
too varied and too vast to take form and body, for they 
suggest the infinite and the eternal. 

With the arts of skillful performance of definite 
exercises the elementary school is concerned, but not 
with the art that is founded upon a science or upon 
several sciences. The lower and lesser arts are but suc- 
cessful examples of attained efficiency, and may properly 
occupy the attention of boys and girls before they are 
ten years old. In this sense, art is but joining together, 
as its philology indicates. The limitations of success in 
these childish efforts to draw, to sing, to play the violin, 
to weave, to make with tools, to cook, to sew, to play 
games, to make verses, to write compositions are two. 
Of these, the first is implicit, if not fully explicit, in this 
argument : the incapacity of the child to see much more 
than the special matter before him and even to hold 
this firmly in consciousness, that is, his incapacity to see 
a thing in its relations and therefore to know its value. 
A child may see truly, but seldom sees wholly. The 
second reason is that the realized psychical development 
of the child but reflects his physical state, which is still 
far from completion and perfection. Nerves and mus- 
cles do not yet coordinate; the very cells of the brain do 
not seem as yet to be constituted as a brain. 

The physiologists tell us what our common experience 
confirms, that the accessory muscles are late in develop- 
ment and still later in control. The baby can walk long 

^ Lotze, Alicrocosmus, ii, 318 et seq. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 415 

before he can roll a pin between thumb and forefinger. 
The boy kicks a big football successfully years before he 
can catch the small baseball. Years before he can write 
well with a pen, he can pull an oar or grub with a hoe. 
The eye cannot be consistently accurate in childhood. 
Thus, all the physical conditions of perfection in true 
art are wanting in childhood ; and we are in danger of 
trying to force an anticipation of mature skill that would 
wear out the very powers necessary to its development. 
Colors, masses, solids, sounds, tones, directions, forces, 
ideas, words, tools, processes, methods, devices, the dis- 
crete data of the arts, we indeed can teach in some 
measure successfully. Such data become nuclei of mem- 
ory and interest, fountains of thought in the wilderness 
of childhood. As the wild profusion of childhood dries 
and dies until the adult mind often resembles a hot, 
windy desert, about the fountains of childish interest 
and skill grow the life-saving oases of true art. The boy 
who drew pictures becomes the painter or architect. The 
girl who wrote compositions becomes the novelist. It is 
in this sense that '* genius, wanting art," is " forever 
dumb."^ And it is in discursive, encyclopcedic instruc- 
tion in childhood and in youth in respect to the elements 
of the sciences and of the arts that the hope of educat- 
ing the great genius lies, such a genius as conforms to 
that dictum of Ruskin : *' That artist is greatest who has 
embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number 
of the greatest ideas." ^ The youth whose opportunities 
were really narrow (not merely so in appearance) can by 
no possibility even of regeneration grow into such large- 
ness of mind and of soul as has been so clearly demon- 
strated in the case of William Shakespeare.^ For the boy 
without education when a little child the hope is of 

1 Longfellow, Kavanagh, ch. 20. 

2 Modern Pai7tters, part i, § i, ch, 2. 

3 Halleck, Education of the Central Nervous System. 



4i6 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

intensity and integrity of genius rather than of extension 
and variety. We never outgrow our own childhood un- 
less we become false to ourselves : we may and should 
grow out and around, above and beneath it : our true 
soul centres there. 

As the motive of Science is truthfulness, for the 
motive of its substrate, intelligence, is to know facts ; so 
the motive of Art is the facile and skillful production of 
beauty, aesthetic sense and aesthetic power, artistry, for 
the motive of its substrate, efficiency, is power to do or 
make or serve well. But Science and Art have values 
beyond the personal, values social, general, universal, 
eternal. They are the media by which mankind is com- 
ing into humanness and divineness : it is our faith that 
in Science God teaches men Truth, and in Art, Beauty. 
The scientist and the artist transcend their individuality 
and mortality and transmit the unseen infinite and 
eternal. 

Athletics, gymnastics, calisthenics, dietetics, hygiene, 
sanitation, work and play : what shall we call all these 
together but the conditions and processes of health ? We 
realize, all of us to a man realize, that health is the most 
important thing in life. But we neglect it, we even ruth- 
lessly thrust it out of consideration. Why ? Because as 
wisdom cannot be won by desire or conveyed by exhorta- 
tion, but is the flower of a lifetime, so health in civiliza- 
tion is an end, not a means. It is, however, as an abso- 
lute, not as a relative term that we so regard health. An 
individual may be conceived as ill, as able-to-be-about, 
and as well. Normal growth from infancy to maturity, 
increase in height, in weight, in energy, in control, in 
activity, improvement in certainty, periodicity, and com- 
pleteness of the processes of digestion, nutrition, excre- 
tion, sleep, sex-functioning after puberty, freedom from 
avoidable disease, exemption from contact with dis- 
ease, progress toward perfect health, may indeed well be 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 417 

considered as concurrent with the psychical chain repre- 
sented by the Hnks, IntelHgence, Efficiency, MoraUty, 
Science, Art, Philosophy, Holiness. As with Science and 
Art, so with Health, only the itemized facts are con- 
ceivable and usable by the child. Moreover, as in their 
cases, so in that of physical culture, there is always 
danger of exceeding the limits of childhood and of youth 
and thus defeating the very purpose of such culture. 
Overdrill, overexertion, too much instruction in hygiene, 
and too complete and rigid conformance to the principles 
of sanitation in schoolhouse construction and in school 
administration, are, however, dangers very remote from 
ordinary public education. As we have failed to discover 
and to develop as yet a psychology of habit to match the 
psychology of function, so we have failed to discover and 
to develop a curriculum for the body to match that for 
the mind. In mental education, imitation and tradition 
avail much, because we learn by example of our superiors 
and from the successful precepts of the past ; but in phys- 
ical education we must deal with the body of the boy 
and of the girl, scientifically diagnosing, prognosing, and 
prescribing correctly, or we must not deal with it at all. 
This may seem mystery and paradox ; but it is truth, 
nevertheless. " It is so easy to feel that our knowledge 
of the material world is simple, and our knowledge of 
moral obligation and of spiritual life a mere matter of 
opinion ; but we must come to realize just the reverse." * 
Unlike philosophy, science has no power finally to solve 
difficulties: it merely shifts them deeper into the mys- 
tery. But in that shifting, it performs immense services 
to mankind, which may be temporary and individual or 
permanent and general. Why God permits conditions of 
poverty, ignorance, and crowding, in which some infants 
are born ill prepared for life, and other infants healthy at 
birth must inevitably deteriorate into anaemic, crippled, 

1 Studies in Philosophy and Psychology : Letter from Carman to Hall. 



4i8 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

consumptive, and otherwise defective youth, science can- 
not answer, does not try to answer. Science, however, 
can relieve the special condition of the individual and 
can show how to reconstruct society so that the immedi- 
ate causes of the general conditions may be removed. 
But the ultimate causes of poverty itself, which are 
ignorance and fraud and precedent poverty (a vicious 
circle, indeed), Science cannot remove, does not even 
consider. 

Our very philosophy as regards the place of health in 
life and in education is at fault, as I have tried to show 
elsewhere. Not only do we look upon health as a means 
to the end of success in life, but we also fail to regard it 
as highly as we should ; these two errors are essentially 
one. For health is not a means at all but an end-in-itself, 
to which most other forces and events in life are but 
means. When we have exalted health into the end that 
in truth it is, we shall be ready to arrange and to estab- 
lish in education the means by which it may be secured. 

These means are three : intellectual equipment for 
economic society so that by intelligent and efficient 
work, either as producer or as servant, one may obtain 
the necessaries of life ; moral training so that one may 
take his place in society and maintain it peacefully ; and 
physical training so that his body shall be strong, serv- 
iceable, and obedient. These means suggest the three 
methods to be followed in the formal system of educa- 
tion, in which they become not ends-in-themselves but 
intermediate processes, that is, educational ends. Such 
a discussion as is at once proposed is foreign to the pur- 
pose of this book ; and it suffices to remark that a cur- 
riculum calculated to equip youth as valuable economic 
workers, whose comradeship in labor is acceptable to 
their fellow workers and calculated at the same time to 
develop in them all the physical energy and skill of 
which their bodies are capable, would be revolutionary, 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 419 

because it would be radically different from all curricula 
now indorsed by public opinion. 

The motive for the serious, systematic, scientific pur- 
suit of health is beyond not only the conscience but also 
the intelligence of most men, because health itself as 
thus conceived is beyond their opportunity and their 
attention. He who labors unremittingly in adult life for 
the means of life for himself and his dependents must 
inhibit thought as to what life itself is. Seeking to save 
his life, he is losing it. Yet he must seek to save it, 
must because his soul is part and parcel of the human- 
ity that brought him to being and surrounds and sus- 
tains him. He must stay his thought of the meaning of 
the life, lest from inattention to the immediately practical 
he fail therein : as, indeed, many do fail and perish. In 
order to seek the meaning of life, some have renounced 
society : such as Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Many a 
vagabond is a philosopher gone astray. 

The true motive for seeking perfect health, whether 
by honest labor, by sufficient rest, by intellectual activ- 
ity, .by moral discipline, by gymnastics, athletics, and 
dietetics, by surgical remedy of malformations, great and 
small, by medical cure of maladies, by renunciation of a 
noisy, crowding, unpitying civilization, by deliberate set- 
ting aside the inessentials of culture, of wealth, and of 
pleasure, by any or all of these, is always the emancipa- 
tion of the spirit from the flesh. One who is perfectly 
well, flawlessly skillful in bodily movement, joyously but 
calmly performing every bodily function, who takes from 
the physical creature everything of which it is capable, 
never was and is never like to be ; but did such an one 
exist, he would be so completely master of his body that 
he would not be conscious of its' existence. This is 
health, for it is body and soul working as one. In that 
co-working, the soul would by its very nature so possess 
the body as to be free from it. 



420 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

Of such health, genuine art, the very spirit of art, is 
the essence, for health is the nature of art, which ex- 
presses universals in the various visible, audible, sensu- 
ous forms of particulars. Philosophy is the method of 
health, for philosophy expresses universals in the forms 
of thought, more or less darkly revealed in words. Or- 
ganized by philosophy, which rationalizes rehgion, health 
assumes the character of holiness, whose motive is real- 
ization of sonship to God, the infinite holy One. Upon 
this vision, formal education dares not look face to face, 
but, in the manner of Moses of old, descends from the 
Mount quickly and humbly. For no man knows and 
manifests, and no man can know and manifest perfectly, 
the way to salvation and the life of entire holiness.* 

Philosophy has a lower aim and a lower plane than true 
religion, but only the next lower. The motive for the 
study of philosophy is to organize knowledge, to relate 
particulars to generals, and generals to universals, and 
universals to one truth upon which all turn; and like- 
wise to organize conduct, to relate impulses to purposes, 
and purposes to motives, and motives to the one char- 
acter in which all consist. Thus philosophy rationalizes 
thought and action. And religion spiritualizes such 
thought and action so that in a state of holiness reason 
and practical life may be one. 

Part and parcel of a sound philosophy of conduct is the 
art of health, which, like all other arts in civilization, is 
based upon certain sciences, — in particular physiology 
and hygiene. The art of health, moreover, like every 
other great art, comprises many lesser and subordinate 
arts. It is, indeed, a system of technics, requiring prac- 
tice continued until habits are formed and established, 
and is based upon knowledge of many facts and prin- 
ciples, — the whole utilized intelligently in the manage- 
ment of a particular and, therefore, peculiar, human 

1 Sterrett, The Freedom of Authority, chapter i. 



MOTIVES AND VALUES OF SUBJECTS 421 

body. Several decades ago Spencer said that few seemed 
conscious of health as a duty, avoiding disease and 
invalidism as immoral.^ On the whole, we have advanced 
since then, as vital statistics show; but most persons 
even to-day are not well, and few are as strong, as full 
of health, as expert and agile as they might well have 
been. The very weight and mass of civilization seem 
opposed to producing a vigorous humanity. Human 
nature, civilized, seems anti-natural. The city, with its 
sewers, its streets, its noises, its restlessness, its ambi- 
tions, anxieties, overwork, overplay, and accidents, its 
sunlessness and crowding, the city which should be at 
best only the occasional resort of mankind, the scene 
of a week's visit for recreation of mind or of a 
month's sojourn for transaction of business, has become 
the fatal theatre of man's tragic passions for excite- 
ment, for society, for wealth, and for power. There 
is land enough upon which children might grow into 
manhood and womanhood and men and women micfht 

o 

grow into wholeness of life ; but no, we prefer (and we 
draw our very laws so that we are compelled to accept) 
the white blight of the city to the ruddy health of the 
fields, — we, that is, the ruling and suffering third of us 
who dwell in cities. And, out m the roomy open lands, 
too many of the rest of us imitate in our houses, in our 
dress, in our amusements, in our worship, in our educa- 
tion, the manners, the conditions, the ideas that prevail 
of apparent necessity in the cities. 

But a reaction of opinion has set in, and a reaction of deed 
may follow, — must follow, if this nation endures. Some 
of the intelligent and moral, some of the well-to-do and 
frightened, have set up their homes in the fields : it is a 
fashion of incalculable possibilities of value in health, in 
knowledge, in conduct. Yet while cities endure as the 
residences of multitudes, the general citizenship must 

1 Education, chapter iv. 



422 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

endeavor to palliate evils not always of the choosing of 
particular individuals by resorting to many artifices of 
device, such as indoor calisthenics, gymnastics, athletics, 
and of substance, such as parks, sewers, waterworks, 
ventilation and sanitation systems in buildings, fresh-air 
excursions in the country, free public baths. The formal 
system of education must include from the day the boy 
enters school all of these artifices in their order. The 
school is the cure for civilization, as we have seen ; and 
it may yet be required to provide a month in the moun- 
tains or by the sea to restore our city boys and girls to 
at least a measure of the playful health that God meant 
them to possess when He gave them being. We may 
investigate forever the mechanics of life : we shall never 
resolve the miracles of growing grass or of the twain 
become one flesh and spirit in the child. 

We know at last that health is the beginning of holi- 
ness, its circumstance, its outward manifestation, its 
form and manner. Therefore is health sacred, right- 
eous, and holy : and whatsoever is unhealthy, that is sin. 
To cleanse our own bodies of unhealthiness and to 
strengthen every personal weakness, to cleanse the social 
body of unhealthiness and to strengthen every social 
weakness : these are moral duties. Who shirks them, 
who offends them, must answer in "the great assize," 
whatever be the nature or the time of that final account- 
ing. 

Many a schoolhouse, most factories, all tenements, — 
and whatsoever and whosoever, whether in ignorance or 
by design, caused these to be what they are, — must 
stand the challenge, — Was it good for the bodies and 
souls of men ? 



CHAPTER XX 

CONSTANTS, ELECTIVES, PROGRAMMES, AND COURSES 

We cannot always be contemplative or pragmatical abroad, but have need of some 
delightful intermissions wherein the enlarged soul may leave off awhile her severe 
schooling. — Milton, Prose Works, Tetrachordon. 

Every want satisfied adds to the fullness of life. The whole object of the fine arts is 
to create new wants in order to satisfy them. — Ward, Applied Sociology, p. 330. 

Horace Mann, being asked, after his memorable commencement address, if he had not 
exaggerated in saying that no possible amount of time, thought, and treasure could be 
too much to expend if it would save one boy from ignorance and evil and train him for 
life, replied promptly, " Not if it were my boy." — Birdseye, Individual Training in 
Our Colleges, p. 196. 

Since education and culture are to be redeemed from 
traditionalism, from particularism, and from teleological 
notions, and since they are to be made valuable for all 
kinds and conditions of men and women in all good kinds 
and conditions of employment and of leisure, the pro- 
grammes of studies and exercises must be made at once 
encyclopaedic in material, scientific in method, and. ap- 
propriate in their application to various individual men. 
In pedagogy, therefore, four questions arise : i. Are there 
any studies and exercises that should be pursued by all 
persons, or by all boys, or by all men ? 2. Are there any 
studies or exercises that are of sufficient importance to 
large classes of individuals to warrant their inclusion as 
electives or options in every system of formal education ? 

3. What is the logical sequence of studies and exercises .^ 

4. What is the logical correlation of studies and exer- 
cises ? Complete answers to these questions have con- 
stituted the subject-matter of entire books; they are 
technical, and as such do not fall within the purview of 
the present work. But brief answers, involving certain 



424 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

principles herein developed at length, are essential to 
the present argument. The logic of this inquiry — a 
proper progressive concatenation of facts, concepts, 
judgments,^ and opinions from which reason demands 
an applied conclusion — requires an issue in formulated 
recommendations. 

Play is an absolute constant in education from birth 
until full maturity ; and it is a very valuable aid in man- 
hood and down to old age. In association with play and 
games, both intellectual and physical, both individual 
and social, a choice of gymnastics, athletics, calisthenics, 
swimming, hunting, fishing, travel, is an absolute con- 
stant in childhood and youth. ^ And in association with 
these more or less undirected exercises, the various lines 
of manual training, so called, present themselves for 
choice by educator and educatee. • In all this play and 
physical development and training, the motive is a facile 
control of the body, a delight in its powers, a desire to 
make the most of it. 

A recognition of play and of physical training as the 
first constant in education, and of games and athletics 
as the first constant in culture, would revolutionize the 
procedures of formal education in most communities and 
of formal culture in most colleges and universities ; but 
not in all. The light already shines in some places. Play 
is the seed-ground of Intelligence ; physical culture, that 
of Efficiency ; and games, that of Morality. And as has 
been displayed already in this argument. Science is the 
harvest of Intelligence; Art, of Efficiency; and Philo- 
sophy, of Morality. And, again, Science, Art, and Philo- 
sophy bring the body to health and the soul to integrity. 

1 Bagley, T/te Educative Process^ p. 131. 

2 ** No books in the world are as valuable as games for the direct devel- 
opment of character. The virtues engendered in the playing-field are of 
the most permanent and valuable nature." Hughes, The Making of Citi- 
zens^ p. 248. 



CONSTANTS AND ELECTIVES 425 

By this dialectic of growth, man in civiHzation may come 
to hoHness. 

Another absolute constant in education is the study 
of the present world, — ■ Nature-study, geography, and 
all the natural and physical sciences in their due order 
and relation. Play, the first constant, is the approach to 
Nature as well as to human nature. " Outdoor life " ; 
what a reproach the phrase is to the ordinary life of 
man ! to our common sense ! to our foolish ambitions ! 
Play enlarges life, Nature-study prolongs it. For med- 
icine, hygiene, botany, field-roaming, camping-in-the- 
woods, and every other investigation and activity that 
takes one into deep and secret places, thrusts Death 
away for years and years from the individual and from 
the race. To know Nature fully is as impossible but 
almost as desirable as it is to know God ; and not one 
day in our lives may we rightfully neglect association 
with Nature any more than we may rightfully neglect 
the worship of God. 

A recognition of Nature-study and of science as the 
second constant in education and in culture would re- 
volutionize the procedures of formal education and cul- 
ture in most institutions of learning, would revolution- 
ize civilization itself by transforming, by returning, 
citizens into men. It is too much to expect ? So were 
the steam engine and the telephone before they were 
discovered. In that great day, Bruno, Bacon, Pestalozzi, 
Spencer, Hall will be justified. 

There is a third constant in education in every land 
for its peoples, the vernacular, not for its own sake, but 
that the soul of the individual may be able more and more 
completely and accurately to express itself. For the bet- 
ter understanding of the vernacular, the study of other 
languages is desirable. " He who knows no foreign lan- 
guages knows nothing of his own." ^ The vernacular as 

1 Goethe, Sayings in Prose. 



426 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

a constant in education includes vocabulary, reading, 
conversation, recitation, prose and verse composition, 
grammar, rhetoric, debate, oratory, philology, spelling, 
handwriting, typewriting, typesetting, phonography, and 
literature; the subject-matter of the native tongue, its 
constitution, sciences, and arts. 

There is for all the educable and cultivable ages of a 
man these three constants and but two more, less import- 
ant and therefore requiring but little comment, though 
vital, — music and drawing. The music includes indi- 
vidual and not merely class singing and voice culture, the 
acquisition of the technic of musical instruments, and 
the principles of composition. For every one .? Certainly. 
For those " born with musical gifts " as a matter of right ; 
for those born without musical gifts as a matter of social 
necessity. Music is the universal language, the soul of 
poetry, the keynote of Nature, the pathway to peace as 
well as to power. 

Drawing: the term here is synecdoche, for by it I in- 
dicate all modes of expression by representation, — draw- 
ing by outlines, in mass, in color, modeling, sculpture, 
painting, — whatever be the tools and material, whether 
chalk, lead, graphite, paper, wood, stone, water-color, oil, 
bronze. Mode and tool are matters of indifference ; 
the representation of reality — of reality often purer 
than the particular real thing — is the essential. 

While there are no other constants for all the educa- 
ble and cultivable ages, there are certain constants for 
particular ages. These vary for particular races of man- 
kind. In a paradoxical sense, an appropriate elective 
may be termed a constant for a particular individual, 
because his mental diathesis as indicated by a scientific 
diagnosis requires a particular regimen of thought 
or of physical activity. The Negro, no doubt, requires 
certain studies and exercises earlier and others later 
than the Teuton ; and the " colored man," — the 



CONSTANTS AND ELECTIVES 427 

American mestizo y originally bastard, disowned and de- 
spised by fathers of the so-called superior race but 
tenderly nurtured by mothers of the inferior race/ 
— abnormal miscegenate that he is, goes to all extremes 
of precocity and of arrest, of variety and simplicity of 
powers. To each race, to each individual, belong the 
constants appropriate to his complete education. 

Arithmetic, both as the science of multitude of mag- 
nitudes and the art of computing them and as a mode 
of conveying information of the world, may fairly be 
termed a constant in the education of boys and girls 
from eight to sixteen years of age. Likewise, geometry 
may be considered a constant for children and youth 
from twelve to twenty years of age. And similarly, the 
algebraic equation. ^ But mathematics in their entirety 
belong to the mathematical specialist and to the phys- 
ical scientist. As such, the higher mathematics are 
properly elective. 

History in its exact sense cannot, upon philosophical 
grounds, claim a place as a constant before the time of 
adult maturity. Incomprehensible in its substance with- 
out the apperceptive materials of personal experience, 
history is a part not of the programme of education but 
rather of that of culture. The effort to reduce history 
to the gauge of childish and adolescent intelligence has 
emasculated it beyond recognition. Such has been 
its perversion in text-books and in popular essays and 

1 Our Negro is literally " a new nation," a mixture, in some instances 
a blend, of many peoples. With a superb physical basis, this " nation " 
may yet achieve notable things in world-history. The beauty of some of 
the women, the unusual maternalism of all of them, and the precocity 
of the children indicate biologically singular promise for the future. 

■2 The reforms scientifically indicated for the teaching of elementary 
mathematics in school are two : to postpone instruction in them until 
the pupils are able to comprehend their processes ; and to present them 
in the concrete so that they may be solved with the enthusiasm and facility 
engendered by interest. 



428 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

narrative volumes, — by reason of prudery, of timidity, of 
sheer ignorance, of the authority and influence of libel 
laws for the living and respect for the memory of the 
dead, of civility and politeness, of national pride, of the 
illusions of things past, and of commercial interests of 
publishers, — that what little true history can be discov- 
ered and comprehended can scarcely be brought to Hght, 
and that history itself is in disrepute for recondite re- 
moteness from real life and for vague superficiality and 
general dullness. In this condition of the American 
mind, history at present cannot be redeemed. 

Therefore, history is a pageant,^ a panorama,^ rather 
than a revelation of men and of mankind. At the hands 
of most writers, biography is overshadowed by the same 
night. "To be a really good historian," said Macaulay, 
** is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions." ^ And 
to be a thoroughly appreciative reader of history, one 
must be of intellectual power and of social and personal 
experience equal to the writer of it. 

This criticism of superficiality is measurably true of 
all the sciences that draw upon history for their mate- 
rials or attempt to analyze society for what it really is 
and contains, — economics, political science, anthropo- 
logy, sociology, to cite the most notable. 

Upon the face of this presentation, it would appear 
that electives are generally but varieties of the constants. 
As such they become options, as, for example, French or 
German, geology or astronomy, psychology or philosophy. 
In a few instances, they are extensions of the constants 
into regions too remote or difficult for the needs of most 
men and women. In other instances, they are fascinating 
pursuits for "the elect," as, for example, sociology. In 
the final instances, they become the special themes of 

1 Birrell, Obiter Dicta : Series ii, Muse of History. 

2 Chancellor -Hewes, The United States : a History ; Preface, vol. i. 

^ Essays: History. 



CONSTANTS AND ELECTIVES 429 

professional inquiry, — theology, jurisprudence, thera- 
peutics, pedagogy, architecture, engineering. 

And obviously upon this analysis, it appears that the 
constants are more in evidence in youth than in matur- 
ity, in the process of education, the plowing, than in the 
process of culture, the planting, of the human mind. 

Some years ago, strong effort was made to group the stud- 
ies of school and college within the three terms, humanities, 
sciences, and arts. Under the spell of this trivium, — medi- 
aeval humanities, modern sciences, ancient arts, — I for one 
was led to argue in public speech and print that about one 
third of the time of every high-school pupil should be spent 
upon each of these subjects. The fallacy of this mechanical 
view — its essential traditionalism under the guise of modern 
technical precision — is self-apparent to the psychologist and 
to the educator. 

The determination of the true order of studies, of the 
particular course in particular subjects, is essentially 
a task for the philosopher. In history, he may proceed 
from myth to biography, to general world-views, to local 
history, to American history, to English, to modern, to 
mediaeval, to ancient history, to civil government, and 
he may end in political science ; or he may adopt some 
other order, as his reasoning directs. His purpose is 
to find the logic of the time-perspective, his problem is 
essentially philosophical. In mathematics, he may pro- 
ceed from numbers to arithmetic, to geometry, to alge- 
bra, to analytic geometry, to calculus, to quaternions, to 
mechanics : again, his purpose is to find and to follow 
the logical order. The determination of the appropriate 
age for the pupil to pursue a particular study is the task 
of the psychologist, whose business is with the genesis of 
powers, with the development of interests and with 
the discovery of needs. He studies the typical child of 
eight, the typical child of twelve, the typical child of six- 
teen years; and he studies also the individual boy and 



430 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

the individual girl and by their peculiarities distinguishes 
them from the standard types. Knowing the types and 
the variations, he selects the subjects and the topics in 
the constants, — always, of course, retaining the logical 
essentials, but adding the particularly appropriate inci- 
dentals and collaterals, — as required for the education 
of the children or for the culture of the youth. 

To this task, few have devoted themselves; but the 
educational psychologists have come to stay and to 
increase.^ 

The determination of the programme by which courses 
and pupils are brought together year by year, day by 
day, is the task of the educator ; but it cannot be per- 
formed successfully until the philosopher and the psycho- 
logist have both accomplished their tasks and can display 
approved results. Therefore, an educational programmefor 
the specific grades is as yet unknown, though indicated.^ 

There are two most technical questions that concern 
us here. Of these, the one of greatest importance is 
whether a curriculum should be arranged vertically by 
subjects or horizontally by grades. It is almost useless 
to study a subject as a mass of information : it must be 
pursued in accordance with its own logic. ^ Therefore, 
there must first be a vertical sequence. But it is quite as 
useless to study a subject before one has the apperceiv- 
ing power.^ Therefore, the second task is to arrange 
the items of the day's work in proper association : this 
is horizontal correlation. The answer to the question is 
that the logical order, the logical sequence, the course 
of the particular subject is the necessary philosophical 
means to the pedagogical end. 

1 The prospect is very encouraging. Educational Review: Bibliography 
for 1906, June, 1907, pp. 47-62. 

2 Noss, The Fourth Year, The Fifth Year. 
8 Ward, Applied Sociology, p. 308. 

* Bagley, 7he Educative Process, p. 106, and works there cited. 



CONSTANTS AND ELECTIVES 431 

The second question, less important but not unessen- 
tial, is how much of the day's work in each particular 
grade shall be required, how much optional (a matter 
of choice between several topics), and how much elective 
— a matter of choice between work (or play) and nothing 
at all (or rest). '* Busy work " in the primary grades 
represents the entering wedge of electives for children 
at school as well as for youth at college. The answer 
to this question is practical. To place an eleven-year- 
old boy, because he is bright and quick, with fifteen- 
year-old average boys indicates failure to see that the 
precocious boy needs not to be pushed forward beyond 
the experiences of his soul, but to be given more work 
of the kind needed and enjoyed by eleven-year-old boys/ 
Hence, the suitable elective as extra work appropriate 
for eleven-year-old boys is the solution, not crowding the 
high school with children, and insulting the world with 
college graduates not yet come to manhood. If one col- 
lege "freshman" can do twenty hours of ''freshman" 
work while most freshmen do sixteen, let him do it ; but 
do not for that reason graduate him in three years instead 
of four : the same principle holds in high schools and in 
grammar grades. 

All elaboration of these principles belongs properly in texts 
upon school management : it suffices here to suggest the 
problems and to vindicate the principles for their solution. 

The argument of this chapter is not quite complete 
without note of a question previo.usly discussed in these 
pages. Does not the need of society properly influence, 
to an important degree, the presentation of certain sub- 
jects in the schoolroom ? Again, I answer, No. As I 

1 " Never press a child to learn. The curiosity of children is a natural 
propensity, which comes before instruction. Conceit is always to be 
dreaded as a result of premature education." Fe'nelon, Traite de V Edu- 
cation des Filles ["Fragments": pp. 9, 13, 11, transl. by B. C. R.]. 



432 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

have argued above, the emasculation of history for school 
purposes has made that subject contemptible and pre- 
vents in this generation in America a development of 
that respect for history which has always marked great 
and enduring civilizations. Our people do not know, 
and because of their school experiences are unwilling to 
inquire, what history really is and teaches. We cannot 
impart to children or instill into them what is essentially 
beyond their powers. Consequently, to teach out of 
proper order and time any subject or topic because 
society seems to require it — in other words, to yield to 
utilitarianism — is to do worse than fail ; it is to give 
offense. Already too many persons have learned the art 
of finance before mastering tJie fundamental principles 
of morality ; and too many have acquired the art of pol- 
itics before inquiring into the science of government} 

Not the school for society, not the boy for civilization, 
not the man for his country ; but all education for the 
most in the present, — which, closely analyzed, is the 
immediate future, — because the whole cannot be greater 
than the sum of all its parts, and mankind is temporal but 
each man eternal. 

1 Cf. Woods, " Democracy a New Unfolding of Human Power," 
Studies ill Philosophy and Psychology. 



CHAPTER XXI 

RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS OF SOCIETY AND EDUCATORS 

God has lent us the earth for our life ; it is a great entail — Ruskin, Seve7i Lamps of 
Architecture, chap, vi, § 9. 

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent 
of the future ; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not care- 
lessly let die. — Spencer, First Principles 0/ Synthetic Philosophy^ p. 123. 

The animating spring of all improvement, in individuals and in societies, is not their 
knowledge of the actual, but their conception of the possible. — Maktineau, Spiritual 
Growth, vol. vi, p. S7. 

The rights of society against educators constitute the 
obHgations of the educators because of their profession 
of competence and of desire to educate. The rights of 
educators against society constitute the obHgations of 
society in accepting the services of the educators. 

The first right of society is vested in the child ; it 
is, therefore, the first obhgation of teachers to society. 
The child has the right to grow in knowledge at school, 
to improve in health and in morality, and to gain in 
efficiency. In a graded school, the obligation of the 
teacher is to take any class, good or bad, and in the 
course of the term to make it better as a class and to 
make as many as possible of its individuals better. The 
teacher who spoils a good class or discourages or con- 
fuses a good pupil has failed in his obligation, voluntarily 
assumed by his public profession. The child ' is in the 
world by fate, not by choice. The unborn babe is doomed 
to birth as is the adult to death. ^ And we who environ 

1 ' ' The doom is on tis, as it is on yoUy 
That nothing can undo ; 
And all in vain you warn : 
As your fate is to die, our fate is to be bornr 

Howells, From Generation to Generation. 



434 MOTIVES AxND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

the child are to him angels of heaven or fiends of hell 
until he has learned what this world really is. 

We need to remember every day that no child is re- 
sponsible for his inheritance. But we should not exag- 
gerate our own responsibility towards the child ; it does 
not exceed our own powers and opportunities. Within 
these limits, the teacher owes to the young stranger in 
this world a training to obedience, a discipline to intel- 
lectual effort, and abundant information. If for no other 
reason, teachers should be constant readers, that they 
may always have fresh and living knowledge to impart. 
If for no other reason, teachers should be constant 
scholars, persistent students, that they may not forget 
what it means to study. Any child is to be pitied who 
feels that his teacher is not intelligent, earnest, ambitious, 
and well-informed. A teacher may have a life certificate 
and a life appointment dated ten, twenty, thirty years 
ago ; the certificate itself will not save him from the 
searching eyes of the child anxious for intellectual nour- 
ishment. Much of the disorder in schoolrooms occurs 
at times when teachers are too tired to be giving out 
information. 

Quite as great as the responsibility of the teacher to 
the child is his responsibility to the mother of the child. 
The mother brought the child into the world in travail 
and in peril of death. In nine cases in ten, the food 
eaten and the clothing worn by children represent the 
personal deprivations of self-sacrificing mothers. Consider 
what it means to be the wife of a man who earns eight, 
ten, fifteen, tvv^enty dollars a week, and the mother of three, 
six, possibly ten children, eating three meals a day and 
wearing out clothing and shoes seven days in the week ! 
Consider the care of the father and of the children in 
sickness, and the anxiety when work is slack or wanting 
and the savings run low! Consider the moral responsi- 
bility of training the family ! Day-work, night-worry. 



RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 435 

even the strain of holiday-making, fear of rent-day and 
**of rainy days :" this is the price that the mother pays 
for the lives of her children. Behind every child in his 
class, the good teacher sees the mother and remembers 
what the child costs the mother in work and prayer and 
sacrifice. School-teaching is hard ; but there is no paid 
occupation so hard as taking care of a family of two 
adults and several children on ten dollars a week. No- 
thing else is quite so hard save combining these family 
duties and working in mill or shop or at the washtub to 
earn money for the family. The death-rate begins to 
take its heaviest toll at the point where the per capita 
family income is so low that the mother must '*go to 
work." The cemeteries are full of the graves of the 
babies and young children whose mothers worked in 
mills, of the mothers themselves and of the fathers. 
Here men, women, and children break under the agony 
of life. Teaching is a sacred profession because the 
greatest service one woman can render to another is to 
help her to rear her children well, — because teaching 
serves motherhood, which is wholly sacred.^ 

The father who earns the money used by the mother 
to keep the child at school has certain rights. Since all 
the fathers vote, we hear frequently about this right. 
In times past, the rights of fathers against their child- 
ren, against the teachers of their children, against even 
the mothers were grossly exaggerated. The slight ele- 
ment of truth is this : the father who is truly a good 
father and a good husband deserves to be forgiven for 
taking a wife and bringing the children into the world, 

1 " Ah, none but she who has borne 

A child beneath her breast may know 
What wondrous thrill and subtle spell 
Comes from this wondrous woven band 
That binds a mother to her unborn child 
Within her womb." 

Finch, The Unborn. 



436 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

and to be dealt with patiently and mercifully, that he 
may be able to go on living in the world and support- 
ing those for whom he is responsible. When he gives 
his life to the lives that he has brought into being, he is 
discharging his debt, though he can never gain a balance 
to his credit in respect to his wife and children. 

Much is said of the rights of the taxpa3^er against the 
teacher. Most of the taxes that go to the support of 
the teacher are raised by levies upon real estate ; and 
the small holdings are usually assessed nearer to their 
true values than the large. The owner of a homestead 
usually must earn from labor the money that he pays in 
taxes. Usually such a man has a family to support and 
his entire income is less than the amount that he 
might beneficially use for himself, his wife, his children, 
and other relatives naturally dependent upon him. In 
consequence, every dollar that he pays in taxes is a dollar 
that he might use to the direct advantage of his family. 
While all this is true, it is also true that his school tax, 
whether levied by state law or by municipal ordinance, 
represents a gain rather than a loss, for most school- 
teachers are worth to the taxpayers more money than 
they receive. It is right that this should be so. It is the 
duty of every teacher, of every artist, of every scientist, 
of every professional man, of every Christian to obey the 
law of good measure and running over. 

But the small taxpayer is not the only taxpayer. The 
entire tendency is toward the development of rich men 
and of many rich men, for the rich are growing richer 
and more numerous with every decade.^ The total pay- 
rolls of the teachers of American cities never equal the 
payrolls of the bartenders. Liquors, tobacco, amusements, 
advertising; each of these items is several times greater 

1 Le Rossignol, Orthodox Socialism, a Criticism ; Mayo-Smith, Statis- 
tics and Economics ; Patten, The New Basis of Civilization ; Smart, The 
Distribution of Inco7ne. 



RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 437 

annually than the entire cost of American education, 
public and private. As Benjamin Franklin said, the 
heaviest taxes are not those of government, but those of 
the pleasures and amusements and vices. 

Again, the teacher is responsible to the teachers who 
taught him, to the world of education and of culture by 
which he himself has been made scholar and educator, 
to the saints and heroes and martyrs who have kept ideas 
alive in all ages. This responsibility may easily be for- 
gotten, for practical life, for ordinary dull daily life, is not 
a season of spiritual illumination and of spiritual exalta- 
tion, but of resolute, silent, patient absorption in the 
tasks before one.^ 

Finally, the nation in whose midst the teacher was born 
and reared, the State by whose laws, customs, and tradi- 
tions he exists, the Church which makes life sacrosanct, 
his life, his pupils' lives, and all the other social institu- 
tions that condition and environ him have rights against 
the teacher ; and he is under obligations to them all. Even 
the city whose officers collect taxes and pay salaries, its 
governing boards, its chief rulers, have a claim against 
the teacher that he perform honorably and diligently the 
tasks that he professes ability to perform. 

The complex civilization environing the schools compels 
an answering complexity within. When a community 
calls for professional men, housekeepers, stenographers, 
clerks, salesmen, it is cruel to send out only composition 
writers and computers of numbers. Every large city suf- 
fers from the diseases of a congested population, — pov- 
erty, over-competition of labor and capital, ignorance 
of hygiene, defiance of sanitation, crime, vice. The 
School should supply the best remedies known to modern 
culture for the overcoming of these diseases. It should 

1 " Tasks in hours of insight willed 

Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled." 

Matthew Arnold, Morality. 



438 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

be the antitoxin for civilization. It is the true antidote 
for the great city. The School is a mode of meeting 
the material development of society by effecting a cor- 
responding spiritual development. 

It is the fortune of every school superintendent to 
listen to the advocates of the thousand and one remedies 
of laymen and of educationalists for the evils and de- 
ficiencies of modern public education. A mere list of 
these remedies by title would fill the pages designed for 
this chapter. Each and all of them presuppose one 
condition, more money, which President Eliot of Harvard 
has happily emphasized in the title of a little book, big 
with meaning, " More Money for the Public Schools." 

The first effect of heavier expenditures would be to 
attract to the governing boards and to the teaching 
faculties of the schools a class of men and women 
superior to those now present. I observed several years 
ago^ that in a democracy ''extravagant" governments 
seldom dare to be corrupt. The general truth that very 
parsimonious governing boards and executive officers 
are comparatively safe in their various modes of benefit- 
ing themselves is not as well known and as well under- 
stood as it should be. Of course, in the essential facts 
any corrupt board is extravagant and any truly extra- 
vagant board is immoral ; but boards that spend freely 
arouse public interest by their appeal to the public im- 
agination as well as by their exciting the resentful enmity 
of the large taxpayer and the suspicious fear of the 
small taxpayer. On the other hand, the board that asks 
relatively light appropriations and spends relatively little 
money is welcomed by a very considerable portion of the 
population because it eases the tax-rate ; and many men 
and women still feel toward taxes the hatred inherited 
from centuries of feudal and royal oppression. To be 
sure, the margin between the light appropriation and 

1 Our Schools, p. lOO. 



RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 439 

the inevitably necessary expenditure is likely to be small ; 
but almost no one suspects that there is any margin at 
all that may be stolen. 

Nor is this the only evil. When expenditures are low, 
and the quality of result expected is consequently low, 
men of ability and spirit dislike to serve the institution in 
any capacity. The result is a low quality of governing con- 
trol and executive service. The officers often try to make 
up for their own small stealings or salaries by developing 
political power through petty manipulations of the posi- 
tions and personnel of the institution. In consequence, 
the institution becomes a labyrinth of illegitimate rights 
and influences, and cannot perform its proper social func- 
tions. When, however, expenditures run high, public ex- 
pectation is aroused ; and the quality of all the persons 
connected with the institution, whatever it be, — political, 
religious, educational, economic, — steadily improves. 

Whatever be the condition of any institution in any 
community, it tends to perpetuate itself by forming a 
circle, good or bad, as the case may be, — an excellent 
quality of control and service, generous appropriations, 
wise expenditures, honesty, impartiality, good reputation, 
high ideals ; or poor quality of control and service, par- 
simonious revenues, unwise expenditures, dishonesty, 
favoritism, bad reputation, no ideals. 

How, then, shall we break the present " vicious circle " 
of education ? By acquiring ideals. And if we could 
acquire them, how should we spend the increasingly 
generous revenues that would follow ? The answer is 
not merely theoretical, it is also practical, for we may 
see here in America many communities and institutions 
with steadily rising per capita expenditures. 

We must not deceive ourselves in this matter. Money has 
been depreciating steadily for ten 3'ears ; and merchandise and 
property have been rising in price. Unless the endowment 
and income of an institution under private control have 



440 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

increased thirty or forty per cent in the past ten years, with 
the same number of students, the institution is now relatively 
poorer than it was then. Similarly with the appropriation 
for the public institution of education. He who shows that the 
per capita cost of education has risen ten or even twenty per 
cent in his own community has proven that relatively his 
schools have gone backward, for thirty dollars will buy no 
more education now than twenty-two or twenty-four dollars 
would buy ten years ago. 

Even worse. The average American possesses now thirty- 
five per cent more property than he did ten years ago and 
has had an even greater gain in income. Public and private 
education lags behind and cannot show even a proportional 
increase, whereas an even greater increase has been de- 
manded by the increasing social strain of civilization. 

We should recognize the State public school system 
as a hierarchy by establishing the best educator in the 
State as State Superintendent (or Commissioner of Edu- 
cation, the title matters not) actually in control of all 
municipalities and should pay him the salary appropriate 
to the position. In populous States, the leading physician 
receives an income that makes tv\^enty-five thousand 
dollars a year for the leading educator seem small. We 
should support the head of the State system by giving 
him an adequate force of competent associates, assistants, 
agents, inspectors, supervisors, examiners, and clerks. We 
should recognize the city superintendent as an officer 
charged v^ith a multitude of duties requiring a degree of 
executive ability so high as to make the educational 
qualifications secondary though essential, and should pay 
him fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a year. Physicians, 
lawyers, dentists, industrial managers of high repute get 
more. So would the city superintendent, if his legal 
powers equaled his actual responsibilities. Principals of 
large schools, supervisors of subjects and of departments, 
directors of popular lecture courses, and other general 



RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 441 

managers would receive three, four, five times as much as 
now, and would then receive only as much as principals of 
schools actually do receive in England, which we are so 
ignorant as to suppose behind us in real education. Class 
teachers in the public kindergartens, elementary and 
secondary schools, colleges, institutes, and universities 
would receive from one to five thousand dollars a year, 
averaging at least twenty-five hundred in even the lower 
schools, and four thousand in the higher. Why ? So as 
to attract the best talent to the work of developing 
human wealth, which is the only real wealth, and which 
is the cause of material, visible goods, and so as to sup- 
port this talent fitly at its work. Strange as it may 
seem to a few, this very stage is but a short distance 
ahead in communities that are progressing. 

We should increase greatly the number of teachers 
not only because education would be greatly prolonged 
and the number of children at school greatly increased, 
but also because we should give every class of thirty or 
forty pupils into the care of two teachers in association. 
We should greatly enlarge our school accommodations, 
allowing at least two rooms to every class, and several 
general rooms to every school. We should also increase 
the area of land set aside for school grounds. And we 
should multiply in variety and in value the studies, exer- 
cises, recreations, and interests to be afforded boys and 
girls and men and women. In short, the very increase of 
material supplies and of educational opportunities would 
increase the obligations of the profession. As it is now, 
we are ignorantly held to be responsible far beyond the 
possibilities of our achievement for want of legal rights 
and of material resources. Perhaps we ourselves have 
failed to see the vastness of our opportunity, considered 
theoretically, and the essential nature and the absolute 
necessity of our function in civilized society; and conse- 
quently have asked for too little. 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE NATURAL MAN : HIS MOTIVES, IDEALS, AND 
PRINCIPLES 

The poor man comes to us from yesterday's wrongs ; and he generates beings who are 
carrying into to-morrow the birth-marks of to-day 's evils. — Patten, New Basis of Civ- 
ilization, P- 7'- 

For where the argument of intellect 
Is added unto evil will and power, 
No rampart can the people make against it. 
Dante, Divina Commedia, In/eriio, canto xxxi, 55-57 (Longfellow, transl.). 

When good and evil alike are seen to grow out of assignable antecedents, by processes 
that calmly judging men can pretty closely foretell ; to rest on laws of growth and disease 
that apply to character as other laws apply to the physical organism ; to express the lack 
of imagination, or the low power of reasoning, that makes men hard, cruel, and unjust i 
or to flow from the over-excitement or insufficient satisfaction of physical impulses that 
make them a prey to lust or to alcohol ; then every thinking man is made to feel in a new 
sense that but for the grace of conditions that he has only partially controlled, there, where 
the criminal passes to disgrace and misery, goes he himself, — the juryman, the judge, 
the newspaper reader. — Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, part i, p. 118. 

The natural man may be the man in complete sav- 
agery, — the primitive man of Nature; he may be the 
man without formal education, in the presence of a com- 
plex civilization, whose influences he cannot wholly es- 
cape ; or he may be the man who has resented formal 
education and opposed whatever else he could of the 
civilization environing him. Of the first type of natural 
man, we have some examples within the United States, 
but not enough for our serious consideration. Of the 
second type, we have millions of examples. Of the third 
type, we have thousands, — our criminals, vagrants, idlers, 
paupers, and parasites. It is the second type that we are 
to consider here, — the untaught man or woman strug- 
gling to live the human life in the thick of things that 
he certainly cannot understand. 

There is a significant confirmation that psychology and 
sociology make for the truths that each primarily displays. 



THE NATURAL MAN 443 

Psychology discerns certain moods in man, — natural to him, 
appearing in due order as he progresses through life, self- 
evolved, genetic, normal, not in the least the product of any 
kind of formal education, on the contrary, often unfortun- 
ately repressed or distorted by pseudo-education. Socio- 
logy discerns certain moods in communities and societies, — 
natural to nations and peoples, appearing in due order as 
the society progresses in civilization, destined, genetic, nor- 
mal, not in the least the product of deliberate social willing, 
on the contrary, often unfortunately repressed or distorted 
by pseudo-science. 

To these personal moods or modes, psychology has 
given the special name of motives. To the corresponding 
social modes, sociology has given the special name of in- 
stitutions. Only in an advanced stage of culture, when 
one can summon the events of life in clear and complete 
retrospect, does one become conscious of past motives ; 
and never is one conscious of present motives. The phil- 
osopher knows why he did some past things : not even 
he knows why he is now doing present things. Similarly, 
in an advanced stage of civilization, when society has 
fully developed a self-conscious leisure class, it becomes 
possible to recognize those products of social motivation 
which history slowly develops and which we loosely 
classify as institutions, meaning thereby not special 
foundations (e. g. a hospital, a college, an asylum), but 
habits, customs, modes of thinking, feeling, doing. 

The primary and one absolutely essential motive in the 
individual man is to live. We may not properly speak of 
the desire to live as a motive, for there is a suggestion of 
definiteness in desire that lifts it above motive toward the 
clear consciousness of purpose. Motive is wholly uncon- 
scious, desire is subconscious, purpose fully conscious : 
stated otherwise, motive is pure will, desire is will and 
feeling, purpose is will and intellection. Motive has no 
object, desire sees an object, purpose sets out to attain 



444 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

the object. But without motivation, there can be no de- 
sire ; and without desire, there can be no purpose.^ 

Motive expresses itself in impulse. Persistence in im- 
pulses of the same nature displays steady motivation, a 
health of body that is also strength. Surplus strength — 
abounding health — displays vitality beyond the require- 
ments of the internal machinery of .the body. It mothers 
impulses, manufactures desires, multiplies purposes. 
Such vitality imperils the soul ; for it tends to destroy 
memory, habit, integrity, identity, character. It leads to 
lusts of the flesh and to pride of life. 

Overflowing physical energy at once invites and be- 
trays psychical vitality. The invalid may think clearly, 
for consciousness consumes but little force : it is phos- 
phorescent : it is the light of universal mind reflected 
from the mirror of an individual body. The man of valor 
may think powerfully, feeding his consciousness with 
calorific combustibles till it burns and flares and shines 
and glows incandescent.^ 

Deficient physical energy also at once invites and be- 
trays psychical vitality. The soul tries to succor and 
rescue the body : for the soul built the body. (Other- 
wise, the growth of the body is inexplicable.) Often 
when the body is invalid or convalescent, the soul is 
submerged. 

The first mode pursued by the soul proposing to live 
is hunger, — for drink, for food, for sleep. This special 
motive in its three phases is seen in the newborn babe 
and in the convalescent invalid. To cross this motive, to 
fail in it, promptly induces insanity and death. 

1 Intention is a concentration of the mind functioning as intellect upon 
a special object. It is the second power of attention. Intention is not to 
be confused with purpose, for it is not the issue of motive, but a highly 
developed form of consciousness. 

2 Of the first type, Pope and Stevenson : of the second, Washington 
and Bismarck. 



THE NATURAL MAN 445 

Very closely resembling the mode of hunger is the 
appetite for warmth (in too great cold) and for coolness 
(in too great heat). In civilization, we gratify this tem- 
perature appetite by clothing and housing, — near and 
distant shelter of the body, whose life is a flame flicker- 
ing upon matter between 94° and 108° Fahrenheit and 
comfortable only at 98.5° ^ 

Resultant from these modes are two, — the motive 
to pay out, to get clear of, excess vigor, and the motive to 
understand the means of supplying these appetites. To 
do things (to get action) and to know things (curiosity) 
are secondary motives, not primary, and yet by no means 
purposes, or even desires. The ignorant, immoral, ineffi- 
cient man of primitive energy, — of motivation, — does 
not care at all whether he expends his energy in run- 
ning, in fighting, in bearing burdens, in heavy labor, or 
burns it up in drunkenness or in lechery ; but expend it 
or burn it, he must. Unless he destroys it, this tre- 
mendous energy will craze him. He is the stuff of which 
the true king is to be made ; but he is far more likely to 
become a demon, a fiend, a brute,^ than a king-. 

The motive curiosity is the mother of intelligence and 
is therefore the beginning of the intellectual or rational 
life. But it is not that life. 

Motive can neither be inhibited nor educated, but it 
may be trained or schooled.^ The movement of motive 

1 There is a discussion of life as a phase of or an identity with ioniza- 
tion in Duncan, The N'ew Knowledge, part vi. Also, Lodge, Electrons. 

2 I use- these words apologetically. No creature of the imagination, no 
animal ancestor or cousin, of man can be as bad as the fearful man of 
blind " passion," — be he citizen or woodsman, sprung from slum or 
palace. Too much feeding, too little thinking ; and man sounds the 
uttermost depths of the abyss of hatred against all living things. 

^ It may be transformed. In appearance, the transformation is a dis- 
placement. But the good lover is always a good hater. He is full of 
motive, has therefore many motives. Their forms and directions depend 
upon his ideas — his knowledge, his opinions. 



446 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

is its gratification. Motive or appetite (its next higher 
phase) is sated by its own activity, which consumes it. 
The function of intellection in respect to motive is solely 
to channel it, and, in this sense, thereby to direct it. 
When we speak of motor-education, we mean digging 
channels (in psychological terms, "forming habits;" in 
pedagogical, " drilling ") through which motivation may 
expend itself facilely. 

Motivation measures energy, — it measures exactly 
that amount of energy which the body produces in excess 
of its own internal requirements. Motivation ceases in 
sleep. Then the body functions without motivation as it 
does without consciousness, purely (if the sleep be per- 
fect) as a physical mechanism. Rational processes can 
neither add to nor detract from motives. They can only 
express them. 

The primary motives of human life, manifest in the 
child, tend to its self-preservation. They have an air of 
self-regard which grows by the purification of the intel- 
lect into self-respect. Self-reliance, independence, free- 
dom, defiance, pride, avarice, insolence, arrogance, an- 
archy, and outlawry are all forms and powers of the 
motive to live. 

There are other primary motives, not manifest until 
adolescence sets in : these tend to self-reproduction. 
They have a note of ecstasy, a tone of auto-intoxication. 
Of these motives, the first is to please the other sex, not 
as individuals but as a kind or class. The second is the 
personal sex-motive, to continue life beyond death in 
a new generation. Vanity, conceit, egoism, lust, love, 
self-devotion, altruism, and self-sacrifice are all forms and 
powers of this motive to live again. 

The last of the primary motives manifest themselves 
in the established adult life and tend to race-continuance. 
They inhibit impulses in the interest of habits. They 
convert the play-spirit into working-force. They con- 



THE NATURAL MAN 447 

serve what is, banking up vitality, as it were, in reser- 
voirs. They centre upon self, but swing a periphery 
through society. From an egotism not less real than that 
of hunger or that of sexual desire, they widen out into an 
altruism that establishes the family and maintains the 
nation as a society, and thereby continues the race. 

These primary motives well up in the soul of every 
healthy man and woman, and can scarcely be suppressed 
by even the worst system of formal education, so called. 

These primary motives spring out of mere life. Cer- 
tain other motives spring from life in excess of the pre- 
sent needs oi the body. Of these other motives, — which 
may be called, arbitrarily, "secondary" motives, — two 
are important. To get rid of surplus energy, we play. 
In order to acquire more upon which to use our surplus 
energy, we accumulate property. There are other ex- 
planations of the play-spirit and of the property-lust. 
These explanations are usually derived from intellectual 
or affective processes. But the true explanations are to 
be found in the motor-processes. We play lest we rack 
to pieces, burn up, with too much energy. We play in 
order to get tired. ^ 

Fighting is not so much universal animal motive as 
a special pre-human instinct. Often it springs from fear, 
which is a phase of the reverse motive to live. There 
is a love of fighting that springs from excess energy, 
the passion for adventure ; there is a fighting that is 
a purely atavistic gloating over blood ; there is a fighting 

1 There is, it would seem, a physiological explanation of the need, and 
the natural instinct, to play. The body in its normal condition produces 
far more energy than it really needs. Heart, lungs, liver, have large mar- 
gins of safety. The cells and tissues, the blood-current, the corpuscles, the 
nerve-ganglia, the pm mater, and all other working and thinking parts 
exceed by two, by ten, times the actual requirement, if keeping alive were 
the sole object. The blood must be o.xygenated and intoxicated in order to 
reduce man below the peril of excessive, explosive, ecstatic, hysterical 
vigor. In childhood, play ; in manhood, work, solves the difficulty. 



448 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

that witnesses simple self-reliance ; and there is a fight- 
ing that is the bitterness of pride. 

Outside idiocy and imbecility, an entirely uneducated 
soul cannot exist in civilization. The mere presence and 
visible activity of educated men in society educates the 
unschooled man. But to be essentially uneducated is to 
be the prey of motives, unenlightened by ideals, undi- 
rected by principles. That uneducated men live as nobly 
as they do is evidence of the essential worth of these 
simple human motives. Knowing nothing of values, 
rationally determined, they trust their motives to bring 
them to the goal of honor.^ 

The genetic progress of the natural man is to grow 
and to be strong, to eat, to sleep, to play, to acquire ; 
after puberty, to grow yet more, to delight in the other 
half of mankind, to desire, and to procreate ; and in full 
manhood to work, to love children, to desire the com- 
mon good, and to enjoy exhilaration that fatigue may give 
surcease of life in sleep.^ There is an air of automatism 
in all this, because reason in it is wholly subordinate 
to motivation, the intellect is a mere tool of desire, 
and affection is accidentally rather than intentionally, 
deliberately, and consciously gratified. 

Over such men the storm of the world passes un- 
known. They are as the deep water below the ocean 
waves. They know not any wind or the extreme cold ; 
but they know also little of the sunlight and of the 
warmth of life. For them, history and culture are almost 
as nothing ; but they have, in loin and womb, the future 

1 It is a striking confirmation of the essential goodness of human nature 
that we distrust the morals of educated men far more than we do those 
of the uneducated. We expect the educated to act skillfully and to their 
own advantage, the uneducated to act foolishly but with intent for the 
general welfare. 

2 " The strength of motive wanes when the protesting organism is 
forced to adapt itself to bad air, bad light, fixed position, and routine occu- 
pation." — Patten, New Basis of Civilization, p. 122. 



THE NATURAL MAN 449 

of the body and brain of humanity. They appear in 
annal, chronicle, history as " the people ; " and so they 
are ; and so we are. In the last analysis, ideals, values, 
all manner of cultures constitute but little more than 
a veneer. The instincts, motives, habits of humanity are 
the solid timber. 

And these are they who build the city and multiply 
the citizens, totally failing to understand what the city is, 
but quickly appreciating by sympathy what the city may 
be. For between the real city and the ideal city of the 
plain natural man and of the dreamer, there is a terrible 
difference.^ The real city is a pulsating social neurosis, 
a fever of activity of soul and of body, a vast congeries of 
associated, concatenating, and opposing forces, — of tra- 
ditions, habits, ideals, desires, — a stormy welter upon 
the sea of humanity, an eddy growing into a maelstrom, 
at once the best and the worst of human products, but 
always centrifugal from God in Nature and centripetal 
of God in man. The real city is the torment of the in- 
dividual who would preserve his individuality and the 
torture of society that would preserve its solidarity, for it 
separates the sheep from the goats, overpays and over- 
punishes ; and it rings the peculiar man, be he good or 
bad, with its adamantine wall of conformity. The real city 
is the paradise of the parasitic classes, rich and poor, 
whose generations, however, it destroys that the normal 
man may prevail ; here the idler finds companionship 
which is happiness. And it is the Inferno (literally) of 
the producing classes, whom it confines at their tasks 
of wealth-creating and child-rearing ; it so confines them 
by visible bounds of distance and time to get beyond its 
limits, and by the invisible bands of the tradition that 

1 This is said soberly. Terror is the mood of the countryman suddenly 
transported into and lost in the great city. It shocks him. Because Gorky 
is in soul a rustic and fears the metropolis, he hates New York and Lon- 
don. 



450 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

human companionship — gregariousness — is the chief 
dehght of life, and of the law that rents, interests, and 
profits shall leave the laborer only the wages required for 
life itself.^ The real city is entirely artificial and mainly 
false.2 It is a flux of superstitions, gyrating upon a central 
truth, which is that by working together men can and 
do defeat the law of diminishing returns. Therefore, the 
natural men have established these immense workhouses. 
Not comprehending the social institutions, or human 
life at its best, they have totally neglected the interests 
of women and children, have indeed perverted women 
from their natural uses and have made of them house- 
animals and shop-slaves. 

The city proposes the defeat of all the laws of Nature. 
It ignores seasons and periods ; forever it is sowing, cul- 
tivating, reaping, harvesting. In the city, summer and 
winter, manufacture — the work of human hands upon 
raw materials — goes on ceaselessly, day and night, year 
in and year out. The city never rests. In the terms of 
human history, the city from Thebes and Nineveh to 
London and Chicago is the death-knell of physical 
humanity. 

But the city is destiny. It absorbs nation after nation, 
corrupts them, and dies when they die, and because they 
die. The city knows not patriotism : who can love the 
tenement of his nativity ? The city is the path by which 
every people passes forward to the gates of its own death. 
And why ? Because the city is in truth the imperishable, 
the unattained ideal of the human race, which would build 
somewhere at some time " the city of God." ^ 

1 This law is challenged by modern economists. Cf. Le Rossignol, 
Orthodox Socialism; Mayo-Smith, Statistics and Economics. 

2 Cf. Chancellor, "The Educational OxxWodk^'' Journal of Pedagogy, 
March, 1907. 

^ We think that because America is an empire of great cities, it will 
not repeat the history of Italy, which evolved Rome only, of England with 
lis London, of France with its Paris. It is a strange delusion. The pre- 



THE NATURAL MAN 451 

In the ideal city, there is no lost man, no lost child, 
no lost idea, no lost feeling, no lost goods. Whatever is, 
counts. Society spells sanity. The multitude specializes, 
assists, economizes. 

The human error in respect to the city has been in 
confusing it with the open country and in not seeing the 
entire incongruity between their conditions. The open 
country is for growing things, the city is for making 
things. Between the open country and the city there 
must be the village, whose-purpose is consuming things. 
The field and the factory are generally incompatible. 
Not less incompatible with either is the home. Before 
the millennial state is reached, we have yet much to learn 
of the city, of the hamlet, and of the field. 

There is no room for homes in any city as such. Nor 
should the environs, the suburbs, of the city be given 
over to homes. Nor can they be. Homes cannot be 
created in the atmosphere or neighborhood of factories 
and shops. 

The mongrel city structure — store below, dwelling above, 
stable for horses in the short back lot — is precisely the worst 
device of mankind for its own ruin via the ruin of the lives 
of women and of children. Tenement and flat advertise the 
incompetence and the indifference of humanity in respect 
to present morals and to future health. The saddest children 
I know are the toddlers confined to a room or two in city flats. 
And there are thousands of them, thousands and thousands. 
They are even sadder children than the little wayfarers in 
some remote, lost country districts, one house or less to the 
square mile. 

The plight of the man in the city — literally the civilized 
man — is worse than that of the man in the open country ; 
yet not much. Into the rural districts we are sending the 

sence of many cities but hastens the physicak degeneracy and the social 
devolution. True empire is always rural because it is always founded 
upon health and individual freedom. 



452 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

mails with the newspaper, the insurance agent, the 
religious missionary, the politician, the tax collector, the 
book canvasser, and the telephone line. We are lifting 
the lost family into social relations, we are enlightening 
man, woman, and child with knowledge. 

The redemption of the countryman by science and by 
art is indeed a harder problem than the redemption of 
the city man. The latter problem is little more than a 
matter of dollars and cents — for the man of the city has 
learned the value of the wisdom of collective humanity 
and is respectful, if not reverent, of public opinion and of 
expert counsel. 

In the light of these simplest of suggestions regarding 
the average or typical natural man of city and of country, 
with no thought of seeking to expound the meaning of 
society and of solitude, I propose to cite wherein the 
uninstructed and the unintelligent (and therefore neces- 
sarily the inefficient, unmoral, and uneducated) absolutely 
fail in the presence of the institutions of civilization. My 
intention is to display in hard lines and in high lights 
why the ignorant prevent the success of the educated 
in promptly spreading civilization through all grades of 
humanity. 

I propose the problem of the resistance of humanity 
to culture. And my thesis here * is that genius and talent 
cannot convert humanity quickly to the best because 
dullness and mediocrity, their antipodes, actively (not 
passively) resist conversion and regeneration. Compre- 
hension of the conditions of a civilization in flux involves 
willingness to think as well as efficiency in thinking and 
ideas with which to think ; and willingness to think is 
pure motivation. In some, curiosity and reflection (that 

1 My general thesis is in the nature of a plea for the abatement of edu- 
cational obscurantism and 'formalism, and for the alleviation of such 
imperfections of civilization as are remediable by education. The above 
minor thesis is the counter side or obverse of the main proposition. 



THE NATURAL MAN 453 

is, willing to think) produce the thinking condition of the 
soul, while in others a civilized morality, a sense of social 
duty in the presence of others with needs and interests, 
produces thought. Natural powers lead to spontaneous 
thinking ; acquired powers (dug and cultivated out of 
incurious, immobile, indifferent wits) lead to artificial, 
deliberate thinking. 

In society, a few are really radiant ; many may acquire 
radiance ; ^ many others are neutral or resistant to radi- 
ance. 

The natural man in city and in country follows the line 
of least resistance : that is, expresses his instincts and 
functions psychically according to traditions and phys- 
ically according to habits. Lacking ingenuity save in its 
lowest form of deceit, ^ he neglects tool and method and 
moves directly, brutally (like a brute), to his desired end. 

1 There are in Nature radio-active elements, whose radiance is due not 
to inherent quality but to the recent presence of radium. Their quality is 
a kind of pseudo-radiance by no means to be contemned, yet impermanent 
and unreliable. (Duncan, The New Ktiowledge, p. 112.) So in human so- 
ciety, we see men vitalized by the presence of a leader, who teaches them 
his ideas and charges them, as it were, with his own enthusiasm. The 
work of an educator differs from that of the leader in that the results of 
the former are permanent. To continue the analogy : The chemist finds 
in pitchblende the crystals of true chloride of radium, which is education ; 
while the physicist brings his baser materials near the crystals, which is 
inspiration. The leader inspires his followers, — breathes his breath into 
them, and they breathe well as long as he breathes for them and in them. 
The educator regenerates his disciples ; and they develop a new life in 
themselves, often a better life than he himself could live. 

2 " Shrewdness, tact, policy, demagogy, diplomacy, strategy, are only 
so many applications of the one principle, only so many varying manifesta- 
tions of the primary intellectual faculty under correspondingly changed 
circumstances. . . . This idea lurks in all such words as cunning, crafty, 
artful, wily, arch, tricky, sly, astute, designing, intriguing, smart, shrewd, 
sharp. ... So much is deception the essence of the principle that, as a 
rule, the greater the deception the greater is the success. . . . The primae- 
val intellect was developed for no other purpose than as an instrument of 
protection from danger." Ward, Psychic Factors of Civilization, pp. 161, 
163, 164, 165. 



454 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

When obstacles turn him aside from his end, he does not 
see how to go around, but quits. When he does not quit, 
but persists by indirection and circuitousness, then it 
is that defeat may educate him. He may discover that 
victory is the issue of method. Defeat can educate only 
one who is potentially capable of education. Such an one 
is overcoming Nature and entering into human nature, 
which in its essence is victory over Nature. 

Nature projects the field and the camp,^ human nature 
erects the farm and the house and the city, all of them 
products of nurture and of culture. 

We may, for convenience, divide men into citizens and 
barbarians.2 The heathen^ and the pagan, ^ the rustics 
and the ruralists,^ have been in all ages and in all lands 
the subject for the ridicule, mockery, and scorn of the 
citizens ; and they have always looked with envy and with 
awe upon the more refined, the pohte*' denizens of the 
cities.^ Therefore, ''citizen" has become a password, an 
introduction, and '' barbarian " and " rustic " are bywords 
and warnings, though in truth the stout yet gentle, the 
just yet charitable, are always best when country-bred. 

But with the disappearance of walled towns and of 
passports, of serfdom, of guilds, and of lords and clients, 
the rustics have entered freely into the cities, to dwell 
there, to multiply, and not to perceive the manner and 
the necessities of city life.^ And with the appearance of 

1 The tale of the Dark Ages is that of the war between camp and city, 
between horde and society. 

2 " Foreigners," from fidpfiapoi, the heavy-witted, the non-Hellenes ; 
peoples not intelligible, the rude and weighted folk; the brave, savage, 
wild; the uncivilized, the non-citizens. 

8 Heath from Aet/i, the waste land covered with shrubs and with weeds. 

^ Pagics^ the fenced-out country. 

s Rus, the country, the space for field and for wood, the non-city. 

6 \i6\is^ city, the centre, the many-in-one ; the strong State. 

■^ The circled, consolidated, protected towns. 

s This, I believe, is the cause of the mournful conviction of Spencer, 



THE NATURAL MAN 455 

capitalism and of wage-incomes, the privileged citizens 
" to the manner born " have encouraged the multiplication 
of these men forced to labor without equally promoting 
their intelligent adjustment to city conditions. 

At the present time, not a few prosperous citizens are 
moving out into the country for summer sojourn and for 
suburban residence, replacing the lost barons whose lord- 
ship disappeared with the feudalism of the old regime. 

It may be said that of that old re'gime, America knows no- 
thing. The South reproduced it in an extreme form ; and the 
freed colored slaves and their children are repeating the his- 
toric march of agricultural laborers into the cities. And every- 
where, North, South, and West, the old inherited mentality, 
persisting through generations, reproduces in this age the old 
characteristics of the citizens and of the barbarians, for the 
souls of men are general and historic, not special and new- 
created. 

Moreover, there is a persistent devolution of character, a 
tendency to revert, in us all : behind every man, though his 
city ancestry be of five or fifteen generations, there are the 
hundreds of generations before ever cities were. At last, there 
is something of atavism, of barbarism, of savagery, of purest 
animalism in us all. 

What, then, are the motives, the ideals, and the prin- 
ciples of the barbarian in the city in the presence of the 
social institutions ? ^ 

The deepest motive is to live, to enjoy living. The 
barbarian, the natural man, would get immediately, would 
seize quickly, whatever offers most plainly the pleasures 
of life. He desires not work for wages, not even wages for 

expressed in 1902, that "the world is returning to barbarism," is indeed 
proceeding " to universal decay." Loliee, S/wr^ History of Comparative 
Literature,^. 2^\. Similarly, because we are now trying to educate all, 
the clever and the dull, some educators think that either humanity is be- 
coming inferior or teaching is growing poorer. It is an illusion of imper- 
fect social knowledge. The error of Spencer was due to the decline of 
his powers. 



456 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

work, but thematerial things themselves. And hereaches 
for them vigorously, violently, to the full measure of his 
strength and for so long as his strength persists. The 
barbarian child v^^ishes to be a man speedily ; and the 
barbarian father wishes to throw off as early as possible 
the burden of his child. 

From this motive to live as easily and as exuberantly 
as possible spring all manner of crimes and of sins.^ By 
reason of these offenses against morals, certain of our 
barbarians degenerate into savages. Of all dangerous 
men, the city savages are the worst. These are not merely 
slum-denizens : they are the slum-makers, the producers 
of the vices and of the diseases because of which the 
word " slum " breathes horror. The ideal of the ** citi- 
savage " is " to live easy : " he admires *' the powers that 
prey : " he becomes such a power. His very thought and 
forethought make him terrible. He who challenges this 
ideal of enjoyment without desert is a critic to be ignored 
and avoided : he who fights it is an enemy to be destroyed. 
The country can produce no man so dangerous as this 
"citi-savage," who perverts the advantages of society to 
its own destruction. The rural savage can do but little 
harm compared with him who is ensphered in a crowd. 

What is the meaning of the social institutions to the 
barbarian ? Absolutely nothing except the immediate 
concrete service that these agencies can render in time 
of need. The barbarian wants property, — gets it, neg- 

1 We think that we have solved some, if not all, of the problems of 
the city. In the concrete instance of the horse (for example), we are partly 
savage, partly barbarous. We drive him on hard and slippery pavements, 
shoe him with iron, torture him with check-rein, overload him, and tie in 
stalls, often for days at a time, this roaming, browsing, play-loving crea- 
ture. In the country we cage him behind city-manufactured barbed-wire 
fences, careless of accident, pain, and maiming. 

This is a trifling matter, perhaps; but it is an incident to the general 
historic demonstration that the city for residence, for manufacture, for 
art, for commerce, has presented an insoluble problem. 



THE NATURAL MAN 457 

lects it, squanders it. He wants a wife ; but in the hour 
of stress deserts her and the children and betakes him- 
self elsewhere. He wants religion, — when he is sick; 
but he is no supporter of church or of charities. He for- 
gets that there is a hospital or a dispensary, until in the 
•hour of emergency it supplies his own need. He wants 
government and the police when overtaken by a stronger 
or a shrewder man ; but he fights taxation. As for all 
the remoter and subtler institutions, — occupation, edu- 
cation, culture, aesthetic amusement, art, science, — the 
true barbarian must be drafted into them ; for they call 
for what he does not possess, trained intelligence, social 
efficiency, tested morals. 

Abolish this barbarian, and the supply of and the de- 
mand for strong drink, drugs, police-service, prostitution, 
alms, cease together. 

Products that sell for money are not synonymous with the 
arts of civilization. Only barbarians make and sell things that 
work harm to others, or things that in their making injure 
the makers.^ 

Only the civilized can see that every act or product that is 
good is good upon the test of its quantity of service to the 
lives of one's fellow men, now or in the years to come. The 
test is the amount of living and the number of lives that the 
act or product helps. 

What are the genuine barbarian principles ? We all 

1 We hear much these days of " the exploitation of the poor by the rich " 
and of " the expropriation of the product of labor by capital." These are 
Socialist phrases, maxims of the cult that may yet become a "religion." 
Far worse than these conditions are imagined to be is the perversion of 
labor and of capital to the production of things — drinks, dramas, vices 
— that destroy mankind. This deliberate turning of men to their own 
destruction by means of their own labor and wealth is precisely the worst 
feature of the modern yet passing economic regime. For it, both rich and 
poor, employers and employed, are responsible. It is no more true that 
a poor man must work for wages in such an enterprise lest he die, than 
that the rich man must use his capital for profit in the enterprise lest it 
die. Let them both die. They cumber, they corrupt, the ground. 



458 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

know them. To try to do right is to make war upon the 
barbarism in ourselves. 

Parasitism is a barbarian principle : to get as much and 
to give as little as possible. 

Ecstasy is a barbarian principle : to feel too happy or 
to be too angry to be able to think. 

Indolence is a barbarian principle : to care not whether 
this world of our inheritance be set in order. 

Childlessness is a barbarian principle : to live indiffer- 
ent to the succession of humanity upon the earth. ^ 

Indifference is a barbarian principle : to ignore the 
possibility of truth and the obligation to promote the 
knowledge and the efficiency of truth. 

Fear is a barbarian principle ; ^ and the desire to create 
fear, likewise. Fear contemplates consequences, not duty. 

All sense-gratifications, "the lust of the eye," "the 
pride of life," have in them barbarous colors and are 
perilous. 

There are other barbarian principles : impatience that 
cannot wait for events and work for results ; remorse 
that regrets the irrecoverable past ;^ obstinacy that pre- 
fers to will and to stand rather than to think and to move ; 
superstition that mistakes habits of ideation for laws of 
truth ; particularism that fixes attention upon items ; and 
diffusiveness that dissipates attention and refuses to 
organize experience. The barbarian is essentially half- 

1 Not mere physical parentage, but the true parentage of loving women 
and children and building families. To be a parent is not an event, but a 
life. There are true parents vi^hose parentage is purely spiritual, to whose 
ministry millions owe their souls. 

2 " Perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment. He that 
feareth is not made perfect in love." John, I Epistle, iv, i8. " True no- 
bility is exempt from fear." Shakespeare, II Henry VI, iv, i, 129. 

3 More clearly than any other thinker, Goethe saw the importance of the 
faith in regeneration — that " men may rise," as Tennyson said, "on step- 
ping-stones of their dead selves to higher things." It is the characteristic 
ethical belief of modern times, the essential meanincr of Faust. 



THE NATURAL MAN 459 

civilized, incompletely educated, neither wise nor foolish. 
The idea controls the savage ; while the civilized controls 
and chooses ideas. The intermediate barbarian has ob- 
session and persistency of ideas with haphazard varia- 
tions that bewilder him. The savage is not bewildered : 
he is wild. The civilized is not bewildered : he is serene.^ 

All these barbarian principles contribute to the love of 
warfare, the universal barbarism. Fighting is savagery ; 
war and preparation for war, militant patriotism, and the 
lust of dominion are barbarism, which is deliberate, 
organized, purposeful where savagery is impulsive, hap- 
hazard, blind. 

The city is more in danger from barbarians to-day than 
is the open country itself. 

The city millionaire cannot be wholly a barbarian, because 
he values property, which is the beginning of civilization. 
When he spends no more of his income upon himself than is 
good, really good for himself, when he cherishes his family, 
when he spends, gives, or invests the rest of his income for 
the profit of other men, he is substantially civilized. 

The country farmer cannot be wholly a barbarian, for a 
well-kept farm is the reduction of the field to the use of men : 
good farming is applied science. When to the order in which 
he tries to set his part of the earth he adds national support 
of the social institutions, though he be isolated in the body, 
from the city, he is a true citizen of the nation. 

The true barbarian has but a short life. In the city, 
his presence, his activity, his sickness, and his death men- 
ace the lives of his fellow men. To abolish him is the 
mission of education. 

The half -barbarian, who multiplies his offspring when 

1 The principle within these propositions is that his ideas, not his ex- 
ternal conditions or even his individual manifestations, cause the savage. 
I have seen Kaffirs from Africa converted into Americans within but a 
few years by the substitution of ideas. No doubt the savage or barbarian 
in the Americanized Kaffir is only asleep ; but while the old ideas sleep, 
there is a new active personality. 



46o MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

he has no property to employ in caring for them and no 
culture to transmit by inculcation or by heredity, is not 
so much a menace to society as an invitation for the in- 
telligent and the virtuous to be active in completing his 
redemption from barbarism. To complete his civilizing 
is the mission of education. 

As for the civilized, the price of their continuance in 
civilization is persistence in education and in educational 
service. 

The civilized must deal, however, with men who are 
worse than the barbarians, the uncivilized, for there are 
present in civilization the perverters of all for which at 
its best civilization stands. These perverters of the good, 
these anti-civilized, these enemies of humanity and of in- 
dividual men, these destroyers of themselves turn life to 
its own ruin, make it hateful. These are not barbarians 
forerunning a gentle folk of later times ; but gentle folk 
themselves turning what is good in their natures into 
evil. They manifest characteristic sins that require in- 
telligence, activity, skill, even certain moral qualities for 
their entire accomplishment. Their deeds are incredible 
to the truly civilized because incomprehensible by them : 
between the vulgar and the polite and gentle, there may 
be sympathy ; but between the bad and the good, there 
can be and is only antipathy. 

These characteristic sins of the impolite and anti-civil 
are lying, promising, betraying, seducing, assassinating ; 
ingratitude, oppression, arrogance, pride, luxury, — all 
the miserable and horrifying tale to be found in the 
Pentateuch, in the Inferno, and in certain modern litera- 
ture, for Moses,^ Dante,^ Shakespeare, and Goethe saw 
the depravity of souls.' 

* This is not to assert that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, which indeed 
records his own death ; but that he revealed the motives of the basest 
men, the anti-human. Cf. Leviticus, xviii-xx. 

2 Dante represents falsifiers and traitors as maniacs, as fever victims, 



THE NATURAL MAN 461 

It does not appear that education or religion can ever 
cure tlieir ills and make them good. Denunciation has 
no language strong enough to name their frauds and 
hatreds as they deserve. It may be that their sin is the 
Scriptural "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost," which 
cannot be forgiven.^ 

Sometimes their crimes are against masses of men, 
whole communities, whole nations. Whatever their pro- 
fessions, whatever their reputations, whatever glory and 
splendor attended them in life or followed them after 
death, the civilized and gentle may not rightfully be de- 
ceived by the apparent success of the plotters against 
life. These uncivilized, these incivil, these unnatural, 
innatural, obnatural, take certain of the methods and ma- 
terials of civilization and for their own satisfaction (sel- 
dom really for their own benefit) use them to the injury 
of society and to the destruction of civilization. 

In consequence, it appears that the refined and gentle 
folk of civilized society in order to maintain and to im- 
prove humanity must convert the natural and oppose and 
destroy the unnatural : in other words, civilization itself 
is a warfare between good and evil, between intelligence 
and ignorance (which is superstition, not vacuity)^ be- 
tween invention and tradition, between charity and mal- 
ice, between industry and wantonness, between virtue 
and viciousness. This warfare originates in motives, 
proceeds by intentions, develops purposes, displays ideals, 
and ends in and is determined by principles quantita- 
tively and physically represented in persons. It can be 
understood only in the terms of a concrete psychology.^ 

as scale-clad, as ice-bound, their bodies tenanted by fiends, and devoured 
by the " Emperor of the kingdom dolorous." Cf. cantos xxx, xxxii-xxxiv. 

1 Jesus, Luke, Gospel, xii, 10. Literally, "false speaking of the sacred 
breath [of life.]" 

2 e. g. Royce, Outlines of Psychology ; "Ward, Psychic Factors in Civil- 
ization. 



462 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

Its conflicts arise whenever the natural man goes into 
the city or the citizen proceeds into the country ; when- 
ever any man adds to his Hfe a new social relationship ; 
whenever a new institution is established or a new ex- 
ample of an old institution ; whenever a reform is taking 
place in an individual or in an institution or in a com- 
munity, or an injury is being done ; they appear and 
reappear with births and deaths, with changing health, 
with accidents. And the more the conflicts and the 
severer, the greater is the likelihood of progress, which 
is conditioned by changes and collisions of persons and 
of things. 

No nation will ever challenge history and win perman- 
ence until it establishes not merely a genuine economic 
surplus but also a genuine cultural surplus. It must 
have cities for manufacture, for mining, and for trade ; 
but no more for habitation than for agriculture. Envi- 
roning the cities and nucleating the open country, it must 
have hamlets and villages for neither manufacture nor 
agriculture, but for habitation. It must have the open 
country for forestry and for agriculture, but not for hab- 
itation. The wood and field will provide raw materials, 
the city will manufacture them, and the village will con- 
sume the products. In that nation, the political economy 
will concern itself not less with the consumption than 
with the production of goods ; and the centre of the civ- 
ilization will be the end of the economic process, the home, 
which will draw about it the nourishing and supporting 
institutions of school and church. 

This is not to assert that the home v^^ill continue to be 
a scene of food-preparation and of petty household labor 
by every mother, house-confined and soul-starved. But it is to 
assert that every family must have a separate house and 
"close," a true God's acre, isolated from neighbors, where 
any child can play in safety in the hours when it does not care 
to play in group or "gang." There will be village playgrounds 



THE NATURAL MAN 463 

and communal gymnasiums ; but there must also be the 
child's own garden, pet animals, growing trees. 

These hamlets will be the clearing-houses, as it were, 
between ruralists and citizens, to the end that whatever 
is good in open country and in the city may be reconciled 
and preserved, and whatever is bad be reduced to smallest 
measure. 

It is the fancy of some that in the golden age of the future 
several of the old historic institutions — family, propert}^, 
religion — will disappear as anachronisms. But the contrary 
is the case ; they will benefit all, basing the lives of all, hu- 
manizing all in any " golden age." There will be more homes, 
more goods, more churches than ever. 

The function of education now becomes clear ; it is to 
lift as many as possible to the highest planes possible. 
We begin in savagery, enter into barbarism, proceed 
through its successive stages, reach civilization, and pro- 
ceed in it as far as we may. The best possible education 
in childhood up to primary adolescence may bring the 
boy out of savagery into barbarism. The best possible 
education in adolescence may bring the youth into civil- 
ization, which in the terms of the individual life is abil- 
ity to contribute to the social institutions and willingness 
to receive from them. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE WELL-EDUCATED MAN 

A good man, through obscurest aspiration, 
Has still an instinct of the one true way. 

Goethe, Faust, Prologue, Taylor, transl. 

To rule the vast kingdom of Nature is the absolute duty and ultimate destiny of man ; 
at present, only the will to possess and to administer is alone wanting to this half-hearted 
meddler in great affairs. — Lankester, Kingdom of Man, p. 31 (abridged). 

The four great objects of all success are : Health, Love, Honor, Power. These desires 
are of the essence of Man. To achieve them, we move upon a line of strategy, deter- 
mined by a constant and a variable. The indispensable constant is Education. Savoir 
c^est a pridire. — R-EicH, Success in Life, pp. 9, 18, 19, 35 (abridged). 

The purpose of education is not to inculcate in individual 
men the ways and notions of civilization that these may 
endure, but that each one may become all that he is 
capable of becoming. To say that logically, therefore, 
education might develop the evil in man as well as the 
good is to expose two premises, clearly false to the faith 
of man in himself as the highest example he knows of 
the works of God. The first premise is that the soul 
of man is at least partly evil, the second is that there is 
such a thing as education in evil. Against the dualistic 
philosophy of the first premise, which postulates two 
gods,^ the history of human thought protests ; against 
the cynicism and shallowness of the second premise, 
reason and love of life protest. 

Education is not induction into conformity with the 
conventions and ideals of society ; it is not adjustment to 

1 Ahriman and Ormuzd of the ancient Persia, God and Satan of medi- 
aeval Christendom, Baldur and Loki of the primitive Teutons. " Mani- 
chaeism may be disavowed in words. It cannot be exiled from the actual 
belief of mankind." Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eight- 
eenth Century, p. 15. 



THE WELL-EDUCATED MAN 465 

civilization.^ It is the discovery of the deepest reaUties 
of the soul, which lie nearest to the Source whence all 
souls spring. In a paradoxical sense, education is evolu- 
tion out of conventions and common ideals by passing 
through and above them. The well-educated man knows 
what the half-educated multitudes know and more, far 
more. Mastering their prejudices, he escapes out of them 
into freedom of thought. Certainly Moses, Socrates, Jesus, 
Bruno, Kant did not conform in thought to their times. 

The end of formal education is to produce the well- 
educated man, whom we shall know by his qualities. 

The well-educated man is completely educated, rounded 
out, built up solidly from the foundation of him to the 
top. 2 

He knows how to see things and what he sees : more- 
over, he can see through appearance to realities.^ 

He remembers what he has seen and can compare the 
new with the old. 

He means to penetrate behind all disguises in himself 
and in others to the inmost truth, for he has the habit of 
truth-seeking : therefore, he turns away from dissemblers 
and simulators.^ 

He interprets his own experience in the light of the 
experience of others ; therefore, he is anxious to know 
who other men are, and reads biography and fiction; 

1 Per contra, vide Sterrett, The Freedom of Authority ; Dewey, School 
and Society ; O'Shea, Education and Adjustment, — e. g. Education must 
seek to adjust the individual in the most harmonious way to society {op. 
cit. p. 286). We must prepare him for his particular needs determined 
by the particular offices he will fill in society (p. 287). 

2 "Too many men build as cathedrals were built — the part nearest the 
ground finished, but that part which soars toward heaven, the turrets 
and the spires, forever incomplete." Beecher, Life Thoughts. 

3 " Science is teaching the world that the ultimate court of appeal is 
observation and experiment, and not authority ; she is teaching it to esti- 
mate the value of evidence." Huxley, Lay Sermons, p. 118. 

4 '• Hateful to me as are the gates of Hades is he who, hiding one 
thing in his heart, utters another." Homer, Lliad. 



466 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

and to know what other men have done and why they 
have done it, and reads biography and history. 

He desires to enter into the life of the race and to live 
in the life of others, and reads history, geography, and 
sociology. 

He desires to understand ever more and more clearly 
the movements of societies of men, and reads ancient 
and foreign literatures. 

He reads not only for the delight in reading, but also 
for the experience that it gives him at second-hand to 
be converted to his own uses. 

His literacy is not only passive and receptive, but also 
active and aggressive ; and he expresses himself ade- 
quately and freely in language competent to convey his 
meaning. 

He can do what he knows, for he can express his 
thought not in words only but in deeds as well.^ 

He has brought his body into subjection to his will, 
and has educated his will to conformity to his ideals ; 
therefore, his ideals function as motives. 

He is quick to act and thorough to perform. 

He is too proud to live without producing wealth (ma- 
terial economic goods) or performing services as valuable 
to society as any forms of wealth, that he may equal at 
least the laboring man. 

He acts upon plan and method to realize an end, and 
thereby economizes his energy and secures results by 
his living and working.^ 

He apportions his time intelligently, a little to little 
things and much to great things,^ meaning to neglect 
nothing that is intrinsically important. 

1 " Bodily activities parallel mental life at every point." Judd, Genetic 
Psychology for Teachers, p. 315. 

'■^ " Unqualified activity, of whatever kind, leads at last to bankruptcy." 
Goethe, Sayings in Prose. 

^ " Those who apply themselves too^nuch to little concerns commonly 
become incapable of great deeds." La Rochefoucauld, Rejlections. 



THE WELL-EDUCATED MAN 467 

He does not merely dream, but acts and achieves.^ 

Whatever he does, he does carefully; many things he 
does not attempt to do ; he knows that a thing ill done 
is worse than not attempted.^ 

He desires nothing that he does not need, and, there- 
fore, confines his activities to fixed purposes ; that is, 
thinking before and when he acts, by forethought and 
care, he reaps the harvest of his sowing. 

He holds his knowledge ready and available for use. 

His every act is either to his own good without dam- 
age to his fellows or to the good of his fellows without 
reference to himself. 

He is careless of personal distinction or favor, but ex- 
acting in matters of personal rights and relations, know- 
ing that society does not progress because of trampling 
upon the honest, industrious, and kindly disposed indi- 
vidual. 

He has grown from obedience to persons into obedi- 
ence to public opinion, and from obedience to public 
opinion into obedience to the principles established 
through ages and maintained by reasons of the general 
human good. 

His only fear is that he may not fear cowardice toward 
men and toward the affairs of Time, fearing only God and 
Eternity. 

His delight is in achievement above his own, his sor- 
row for every failure of his fellows, his pain for every sin, 
for he sees in each man a brother and in woman a sister, 
and realizes that he himself is a failure and disposed to 
sin. 

He insists that his conduct must conform to his sen- 

1 " Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the 
world weigh less than a single lovely action." Lowell, Rotcsseaii and the 
Setttimentalists. 

2 " Want of care does us more damage than want of knowledge." Frank- 
lin, Poor Richard'' s Almanac. 



468 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

timents, holding himself rigidly and loyally to perform- 
ance as nearly as possible according to aspiration.^ 

In his own life, he repeats as completely as possible the 
achievement of man in the redemption of soul from flesh, 
realizing the ideals of chastity, monogamy, paternity, 
fihal piety, honor, honesty, and brotherly love. 

He is just before he is generous, but is always gener- 
ous, first being just. 

He is patient to the uttermost.^ 

He rejoices in the excellencies of others and grieves 
in silence over their faults, never running publicly and 
noisily to forgive them. 

He is never forward save for a worthy cause ; for that 
he is willing, if need be, to die. 

He will die, if need be, for friend or for country or for 
the truth that he believes ; that is, for the faith that is 
in him. 

He knows that sin is "the eternal outlaw,"^ and that 
sin, if begun, may be persisted in, and that, if persisted 
in, it will outlaw him. 

He lives openly because he can afford to do so ; and 
his openness is as natural as is the shining of the sun.^ 

He has, indeed, in his own nature a charity like " the 
natural charity of the sun."^ 

1 "To professional honor must be added the habit of the veteran." 
Birdseye, Indiistrial Training in Our Colleges, p. 334. 
2 " The inspired soul but flings his patience in, 

And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe ; 
One faith against a whole world's unbelief, 
One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 

Lowell, Columbus. 

3 Milton, On Divorce. 

4 " Openness is the sweet fresh air of our moral life." George Eliot, 
Daniel Deronda, chapter xxxiii. 

"Certainly the ablest men that ever were have had all an openness and 
frankness of dealing and a name of certainty and veracity." Bacon, 0/ 
Sitmdation a7id of Dissimulation. 

^ Browne, Religio Medici, part ii, § ill. 



THE WELL-EDUCATED MAN 469 

He holds near and dear the friends of his youth as 
long as God spares them, and adds new friends as the 
years go by ; eager for new friends, he is even more eager 
to keep those whom he has.' 

He lends no ear to calumny, but answers it with an 
angry countenance,^ pitying the frailty of others who 
err, but rebuking whoever delights in the tale of error, 
for he knows that even a good and honest man may be 
misled by plausible hearsay or by the report, it may be, 
of his own senses.^ 

He repeats no tale of evil save upon necessity, and 
judges no man unless not to do so might lead to yet 
greater evil.^ 

When courage avails naught to go forward, he stands 
upon the solid ground of fortitude. 

He has the intelligence to conceive, the will to exe- 
cute, and the heart to desire things good for himself and 
for others.^ 

He is glad to confess his sin ; ^ he confesses and 
repents. ■^ 

1 " If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through 
life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his 
friendships in constant repair." Johnson, in Boswell, Life of Doctor Sam- 
uel fohnson. 

2 Proverbs, xxv, 23. 

3 «' In my opinion, the best of all characters is his who is as ready to 
pardon the moral errors of mankind as if he were every day guilty of 
such errors himself, and at the same time as careful not to commit a fault 
as if he never forgave one." Pliny, Letters, book viii, 22. 

* " If thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee ; and be bold, it will 
not burst thee." Ecdesiasticus (Jesus son of Sirach), xix, 10. 

^ Cf. Junius, Letters, xxxvii. 

6 " The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact 
that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers 
the noble attitude of simplicity." George Eliot, Romola, chapter ix. 

' " He who repenteth truly is greatly sorrowful for his past sins : not 
with a superficial sigh or tear, but with a pungent, afiflictive sorrow, — such 
a sorrow as hates the sin so much that the man would choose to die rather 
than act it any more." Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living, chapter iv, § ix. 



470 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

His greatest interest is in that enterprise in which he 
is personally disinterested, for he conceives society as 
his true and larger self ; therefore, he wins. ^ 

He loves to give and grudges to receive, fearing lest 
he has not given full measure, running over ; ^ he desires 
always to give, and never to get, something for nothing : 
moreover, he is always ready to give away, caring not 
whether " the bread cast upon the waters " ever return ; 
yet he knows that God, the infinite spendthrift, gives 
only of His own ; nor does he take counsel whether the 
receiver deserves the gift, for God sends His rain upon 
the just and the unjust alike. 

He listens to no wanton tales,^ but seeks spiritual de- 
lights ; and his own speech is of the aspirations of the soul.^ 

Manifesting thus in every act, in every word, in every 
disposition, and even in his silence, the evidences of intel- 
ligence, of efficiency, and of morality, the well-educated 
man proceeds to acquire the powers, the arts, and the 
graces of culture : he has built him a mansion, and would 
furnish it as a suitable residence for his soul. He needs 
the goodly furniture of the sciences, and the adornments 
of art : he needs to set in order within and without, in 
the gardens and in the galleries, all things that he has 
acquired : he needs philosophy. And not for a moment 
may he neglect the tenant of his body, which is his soul, 
nor the tenement of his soul, which is his body. 

He will value truth and seek to acquire all truth in 

1 *' To be disinterested is to be strong, and the world is at the feet of 
him whom it cannot tempt." Amiel, Journal. 

2 " Be charitable before wealth makes thee covetous, and lose not the 
glory of the mite. If riches increase, let thy mind hold peace with them." 
Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals, part i, § 5. 

3 " That wanton word will set a wanton heart on fire which a sober 
heart doth hear with pity as a kind of bedlam of speech." Richard Baxter, 
Christian Ethics, p. 368. 

^ " Cure fleshly desires and delights by spiritual desires and delights." 
Op. cit. p. 261. 



THE WELL-EDUCATED MAN 471 

relation and exactly ; above truth, he will value beauty ; 
and goodness above beauty/ aspiring after holiness as 
the farthest stage upon the journey toward perfection 
that finite man can reach. 

Upon reason, he will always preserve the faith that 
hope may triumph over experience ; ^ and he will never 
despair of the victory of right over wrong, of principle 
over expediency. 

He will become pleasing in his excellencies, and not 
displeasing even in his faults. 

He will rate wealth as fundamental, but only as that, 
never as final. 

He will learn not to confuse fame with reputation or 
power with applause or property with personal desert or 
popular favor with genuine support, or indeed any thin or 
false appearance with the real fact or truth. 

Because he is but one, he will not shuflfle off responsi- 
bility, but will do what he can and all that he can, and 
calmly leave the event to God ; rather because he is but 
one, he will really be one, integral, self-dependent, forth- 
going, and substantial.^ 

He will learn that since God alone is finally respon- 
sible, even for himself, he is not to take too seriously the 
circumstances and events of life, for there is a cosmic 
weather beyond human control.^ 

Ignoring democracy, he will obey his real superiors, 
will advise and receive the advice of his equals, and will 
rule his inferiors, and, ignoring aristocracy, will seek to 
hold all men at their particular values. 

1 " Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks." 
George Eliot, Komola, chapter xix. 

2 Johnson, in Boswell, Life of Doctor- Samuel jfohnsoii. 

^ '' Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto 
others : and let the world be deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of 
heaven." Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals, part i, § 19. 

* " One on God's side is a majority." Wendell Phillips, Brooklyn 
Speech, Nov, i, 1859. 



472 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

He will fight evil in the world, whether it directly 
affects himself or not, knowing that the sorest evil of all 
evils is to become indifferent, insensible, callous. 

He will forever believe that " somehow good shall be 
the final goal of ill ;"^ and will try so to interpret each 
evil ; but he will never allow this belief to dull his own 
will to do right and to forestall and to overthrow 
wrong. 

He will understand that life is a battle in which "the 
Son of man goes forth to war," ^ and will not rejoice 
until the hour of peace after victory. 

He will know that most desired results are the issue 
of long processes, and will gladly pay the price by labors 
in science to accumulate truth and in art to acquire skill ; 
he will pay cheerfully the price in waiting also and in 
self-denial ; he will measure his progress or his retro- 
gression in this life of scientific research or artistic 
endeavor by the numbers and the quality of the diffi- 
culties upon his way. 

He will play his part in every social institution, 
desiring to make his soul a microcosm of the cosmos, 
a true image of the world, and to find his own self in all 
the society of men : therefore will he belong to Family, 
to Church, to School, to State, even to Business, and in 
the hour of defense to War ; and upon occasion such 

1 The line is from Tennyson; cf. Longfellow: — 

" It is Lucifer ; 
The son of mystery ; 
And since God suffers him to be, 
He, too, is God's minister 
And labors for some good 
By us not understood." 
Cf. also Shakespeare : — 

" There is some soul of good in things evil, 
Would men observingly distil it out." 

Henry V, iv, i, 4. 

2 Luther, Hyntfi, first line. 



THE WELL-EDUCATED MAN 473 

lesser institutions as serve the whole purpose of human- 
ity ; for he has eschewed narrowness to preserve growth, 
and will not dissipate his energies upon haphazard, but 
will centre them upon the enduring movements of the 
race. 

He will love his wife^ and his children beyond himself, 
finding his self-respect in entire devotion to those whom 
God has intrusted to him ; moreover, he will love his 
kindred and his neighbors with an affection beyond any 
concern or interest for himself : and thus will he go 
about in the world a free man and unashamed. 

Whatever light he gets he will use by taking it forward 
into the greater darkness.^ 

He will recognize discouragement as either physical 
fatigue or as *' the sin of Lucifer." ^ 

Whatever seems to him righteousness, that he will 
serve."* 

And he will live beholding death before him not as an 
evil, because it cuts off hope ; ^ nor yet as a mockery ; ^ 

1 " And they twain shall be one flesh." Jesus, Mark, Gospel, x, 8, 9, 
quoting Genesis, ii, 24. 

2 "The light that we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring 
on, but by it to discover onward things, more remote from our knowledge." 
Milton, Prose Works, vol. ii, p. 89. 

8 " Discouragement is but disenchanted egotism." Mazzini, Works, vol. 
vi, p. 25. 

* " Who is there that in all things serveth righteousness with so great 
care as the world and its lords are served withal } " Coit, after Thomas h 
Kempis, Imitation of Christ, II, ii, 2, 3. 
^ Hazlitt, Characteristics, no. 35. 

6 " I dare not guess ; but in this life 
Of error, ignorance, and strife, 
Where nothing is, but all things seem, 
And we the shadows of the dream, 
It is a modest creed, and yet 
Pleasant, if one considers it, 
To own that death itself must be. 
Like all the rest, a mockery." 

Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, Conclusion. 



474 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

but as a consolation ; ^ yes, as a victory ;2 and he will 
not die, but will be ready to pass into the different life, 
in the faith that it will be larger, fuller, and better. 

1 " Dark mother, always gliding near, with soft feet, 

Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome ? 
Then I chant it for thee ; I glorify thee above all ; 
I bring thee a song, that when thou must indeed come, 
Come unfalteringly." 

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, p. 260. 
2 Isaiah, xxv, 8 ; Paul, I Corinthians, xv, 54. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE LINE OF MARCH 

And I believed the poets ; it is they 
Who utter wisdom from the central deep, 
And, listening to the inner flow of things. 
Speak to the age out of eternity. 

Lowell, Columbus. 

But to him that knoweth not the port to which he is bound, no wind can be favorable. 
— Lkighton, Works, vol. iv, p. 194. 

The indwelling divinity that shapes the ends of human living appointed freedom to be 
the goal of human progress. — Horne, Philosophy of Education, p. 135. 

Upon the northern side of a lake in the heart of Maine 
there is a forest that in a significant manner reminds the 
city visitor of the civilization whence he came. One 
reaches this pathless tract of the woods by boat or canoe 
across the lake. Going ashore, one enters a thicket of 
little birches, pines, hemlocks, beeches, and chestnuts, 
the trees standing of all heights from shoots just out 
of the ground to saplings of ten or twelve feet. So dense 
is the thicket that one cannot see ten feet in any direc- 
tion. The beauty of the green and yellow masses of 
young life in the sunshine of a summer's day is exhil- 
arating. The very ground seems to exult in life. Over all 
shines the unbroken blue of the sky. Breasting one's 
way forward through the maze for a half-mile beyond 
the lake, one reaches a second wood. The scene is 
strangely transformed. Here are tall pines and hemlocks, 
clumps of chestnuts and of birches, and an occasional 
triumphant beech ; and here are thousands of dead trees 
still standing, visible evidence that the warfare of the 
leaves for sunlight and of the roots for water has not 
been without victims as well as victors. As one looks 
about, the sadness of the forest life is oppressive. Upon 



476 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

the ground, here and there, are patches of turf, where the 
sunhght of heaven still flickers down. A mile of this 
wood of the dead and the living, and one reaches the 
oldest wood. Here travel is free among the giant trees. 
Above, the sky is scarcely visible even in spots ; Jpelow 
is a soft carpet of moss. Brooks and rivulets are edged 
with ferns. Now and then one passes a ruin ; an old, 
overgrown, and rotted pine or chestnut or beech had 
caught the storm upon its mighty head, and had fallen 
in the death struggle. That handbreadth of open sky 
up there marks where this great white birch stood 
before the March gale uprooted it and threw it here. Its 
emulous brethren of the forest will soon fill in that sky- 
space. This wood is the last chapter of the warfare: the 
little dead trees of a century ago are but the rich mould 
that makes the ground soft to the tread of beast or man. 

What caused these woods ? Great fires ate up this and 
that stretch of the forest ; and seeds and spores in the 
ground came to life. The first wood is but four years 
old, the second is thirty, the third is older than the 
memory of man. 

Like the trees in the woods are the men of the grow- 
ing, spreading American town and city. In the early 
days of the city, upon some fortunate site by sea or lake, 
upon river or railroad, there are space, sunlight, food, and 
water for all, for there is equality of opportunity. But, 
after forty, ninety, two hundred years, there are classes 
of supreme individuals, — capitalists, landlords, profes- 
sional men, politicians, — and masses of dependents, — 
tenants, wage-earners, parasites. The lords grow and 
grow. The serving-men cannot rise to the higher plane 
where the sunlight pours in floods. This is literally 
true. Imprisoned by the wage-rate, the price-range, and 
the standard of living, the proletarian cannot grow. The 
third state of the city is the worst. We do not yet see 
it in America ; but Rome saw it in the Decline and 



THE LINE OF MARCH 477 

Paris saw it in the Revolution. The city is ruined utterly 
when it oppresses its provinces and colonies, over- 
shadowing their lives and draining their food-supplies 
without return. It will make no difference whether the 
oppression takes the mode of political taxation and con- 
fiscation as it did in Rome, or the mode of seignorial and 
ecclesiastical exactions as in France, or the mode of 
economic exhaustion by rents and profits as it may 
yet do in America. The doom of a people is sealed 
when it is no longer profitable and joyous to live in the 
free air upon one's own land, eating the fruits of labor. 
We must get from the open country constant acces- 
sions of vigorous boys and girls, men and women ; or 
perish. Wage-starved farm-laborers upon the machinery- 
cultivated farms of great capitalists cannot breed and rear 
competent American citizens. Such a day, when our 
cities shall be composed of privileged millionaires living 
in parks and palaces and of proletarians crowded into 
tenements, and when the country shall be a waste, is, of 
course, far off : it may never come. But it will come as 
certain as history is certain, unless we can solve the 
hitherto unsolved problem of securing in each generation 
saecula saecitlonim a sufficient number of persons to 
maintain the civilization. It may be the will of God 
that no people shall ever solve the problem. It may be 
that it is best for mankind that, freed from all traditions, 
the light of culture shall move from people to people, 
until humanity itself shall pass utterly away. 

However this may be, it still remains the duty of every 
thinker,, of all the righteous, of the free in soul, to de- 
sire and to urge, whatever be the present social condi- 
tions, such an organization of society as encourages the 
development of perfect, not blighted, not starved human 
beings. The lone tree in the pasture, spreading vast 
branches into the sunlight, into the rain, into the gale, 
spreading into the soil vast roots that grip the rock, 



478 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

typifies what every family should be. And how can such 
a family grow save by life upon land ? 

But in the real world of American men and women, 
hov/ different is the typical condition of the family ! 
How little has Nature, how much has Civilization or- 
dered its life ! When wages are high and work is steady, 
marriages increase and the birth-rate rises. ^ We owe 
our wives and our husbands, our children, our own lives, 
to the social milieu. The Acts of Congress, the decrees 
of the Church, the processes of trade, scientific discov- 
eries and technical inventions, wars, heroisms, mostly 
silent, — these caused our being and condition us now. 
By them, we live ; and by them, we die. 

A city of nearly four hundred thousand souls lay at 
the junction of railroads and steamship lines. The earth 
quaked ; and its buildings of steel or stone or wood fell 
like houses of cards. Fire, the transformer, the great- 
est blessing, the most terrible curse of man, came and 
ate up the ruins and what the earth-powers had spared. 
And four hundred thousand people were desolate. Tell 
the story to the men of ancient Nineveh ; and they 
answer, *' How save them .? " and " Why save them } " 
How } By the thousand inventions of man since the 
people of Nineveh rotted away, leaving their houses and 
temples to be buried in the sands from the deserts. 
Consider these inventions, — iron, steel, tools, machinery, 
steam, electricity, telegraph, telephone, typewriter, the 
public army, federal government, medicine, credit. Why 
save the San Franciscans } Because in three thousand 
years these inventions have developed human gregari- 
ousness into world-wide social sympathy. This cosmo- 

1 Mayo-Smith, Statistics and Sociology^ p. 74. This fact is carefully to 
be discriminated from the more important fact that as communities and 
classes rise in culture both death-rates and birth-rates decline ; and from 
another fact that poverty without hope is reckless in all respects, — mar- 
riage, births, diseases, deaths. 



THE LINE OF MARCH 479 

politanism has transformed the rivalry of many cities 
into commonwealth and enlarged into vast empires the 
regions of domestic peace. 

To the city inhabitant of three thousand years ago as 
to the country primitive of to-day, the rescue of the San 
Franciscans would appear to be the work of superhuman 
beings, and the motives as well as the methods would be 
unintelligible. What we are very apt to forget is that 
the past and the primitive persist in the present so that 
to millions and millions of modern men, women, and 
children, the advanced life of the modern world is not 
understandable ; and because it is not understandable, 
it is to them unknown. Only one of imaginative intel- 
lect can comprehend a tale or an exposition or a picture 
of that which one has not personally experienced. 

There follows from this a practical application in edu- 
cation. The motive in education is to develop power to 
understand modern human life. This is the motive both 
of the pupil and of the educator. The pupil aspires to 
grow, the educator intends to nourish the growing soul of 
the pupil. In respect to the pupil, the material that is to 
be developed is his own soul ; in respect to the educator, 
the materials to be supplied to the pupil are the facts and 
principles, that is, the truth, of the world of Nature 
and of the world of humanity that environ him. Most 
of the facts of the latter world and many of those of 
the other, some of the principles of human nature and 
most of those of the natural world are unworthy of in- 
telligent, energetic, righteous, and merciful men and 
women. True civilization is progress away from Nature.^ 
The survival of the fittest, warfare, brute force, sex- 
promiscuity, and uncounted other displays of the brute, 
civilized man is slowly discarding. Egoism is not dying, 
but is developing altruism, its counterpart, its mate. 
These are obverse and reverse of the solid shield. By 

1 "Man is Nature's rebel." Lankester, Kingdom of Man, p. 26. 



48o MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

their interaction, these forces generate humanity, and 
all its most active powers of mind and soul. 

Not merely as a matter of abstract principle, but also, 
and very definitely, in the concrete actions and disposi- 
tions of individuals must Nature be rejected by sound 
human morality. I have seen in civilization so much of 
the bitterness of life, its cruelty, its brutishness, its piti- 
lessness, its crass ignorance and vain pride, its abomina- 
tions worse than any possible degradation of animalism ; 
that at times civilization seems to me a refinement of the 
worst rather than of the best in man. Need I specify ? 
I have known child-bearing wives to be beaten by hus- 
bands, fathers merrily carousing in dining-rooms when 
their own babies lay in caskets in parlors, children cuffed 
into insensibility and beaten with lead pipe into idiocy, 
elegant women luxuriating on the avenues upon the rents 
of slum tenements, and even of dens of infamy, city 
councils debauched that rich men might be yet richer 
and poor men be transformed into scoundrels, widows 
robbed by smug hypocrites, ambitious boys blocked in 
their progress, lovely girls ruined in ways beyond num- 
ber and imagination, parents and near relatives aban- 
doned to the cold mercy of the public ; and what not ? 
Nineveh has come again in New York and Chicago, and 
Sodom reappears in many a city. These things I know : 
I have not only read them in books, in newspapers, or 
in histories. The Boston of the eighteenth century 
would not know the morals of the Boston of to-day. All 
the world is changed. And we must face the crucial 
question, — Shall we leave the issue of virtue against 
vice to laissez faire, or shall we interfere } The old 
personal morality is not enough to solve these new ques- 
tions. It may be that for his own soul's welfare, a Car- 
negie, a Rockefeller, a Vanderbilt, a Gould, a Field, or 
any other multimillionaire or millionaire, or for that mat- 
ter any rich man, should sell all that he has and give to 



THE LINE OF MARCH 481 

the poor ; * but to do so would only ease his own burden 
of responsibility and convert a necessary callousness 
into a genuine tenderness toward humanity, for the mis- 
ery of the world has become too great to be relieved by 
even a billion dollars or by a billion dollars' worth of 
goods. The ethical problems of to-day cannot be solved 
in this wise : perhaps they cannot be solved at all ; but 
if they can be solved, it must be by operation of the 
entire social machinery, by the effective functioning of 
all the social institutions, and by the development of 
yet new institutions. Persons are no longer enough. 
Particular societies and corporations are no longer enough. 
We need for the redemption of man all the vital, intel- 
lectual, emotional, and moral resources of society, di- 
rected by the institutions of Family, Church, State, 
School, all Arts and Cultures. From what is man to 
be redeemed ? From the renewed private feudal wars 
now known as Business, from all public wars of nations, 
and from the rebarbarization to which every generation 
inevitably tends from mere atavism and congenital 
ignorance. Let us not forget that minds and souls 
are wrecked by financial insolvencies and by financial 
plethoras, that bodies are destroyed in millions by pov- 
erty and rotted in thousands by luxury, that every "war 
sets back the hands upon the clock of progress, and that 
sighings and tears and white, silent griefs are not yet 
gone out of the earth. There is still evil for the sake of 
ends ; and, worse, there is evil in sheer malice. Why ? 
Because, as every one knows, the agencies of good have 
not yet triumphed in the world over the agencies of 
evil ; to use theological terms, Christ has not yet over- 
come Satan. There is a love of God, a desire to return 
into the bosom of the Father, a longing of the finite to be- 
come once more a part, as I believe, a self-understanding 
and self-directing part, of the Infinite that can and does 

1 Jesus, Matthew, Gospel, xix, 21. 



482 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

overcome the natural in man, for the spiritual is higher 
than the natural and can reduce and absorb it once 
more into itself. How? By regeneration as by conversion 
of individuals and by revolutions of peoples ; and what 
is regeneration but return once more into the spirit ? 

In social conditions of ignorance and poverty, the fer- 
tile soils of the natural vices, and in social conditions of 
congested property in wealth, the fertile soil of the arti- 
ficial vices, the ignorant and the poor multiply so fast as 
to endanger the stock of the race by reducing its quality 
while the intelligent and the rich persistently decrease 
in numbers; therefore, the masses increase and the 
leaders decrease. The chaos that sets in is lit only by 
hatreds and by ideals : which together generate thought 
and action. This road leads down into the hell of social 
revolution.^ In this relation, education becomes the cure 
for civilization, and effects its cure in a variety of ways. 
The road of education, therefore, is the only road upon 
which a nation can travel safely forever ; it is a true 
line of march. What is this road ? To develop by educa- 
tion and to utilize by culture in civilization all the powers 
of every individual and to let nothing whatsoever inter- 
fere with so doing ; this is a strait and narrow road, 
"the strait and narrow way" that leads to life, to ever 
more life. It means at once energy and restraint, faith 
and doubt, courage and caution, speech and silence, ego- 
ism and altruism, knowledge of this world and a sense 
of a world beyond, all things in just balance ; in short, 
wisdom, health, and holiness. Few have found this way: 
no nation has ever followed it long. But those who find 
and follow it, of course, live forever; and the nation that 
finds and follows it will live as long as grass grows upon 
the earth. 

* " When the emotions take side with the intellect, then comes the 
moral earthquake that destroys the existing order." Stephen, History of 
English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, p. 17. 



THE LINE OF MARCH 483 

We need not speak of this supreme matter altogether 
wholly in generalities. It means a low birth-rate, that 
ev'ery child may be well cared for, and a low death-rate, 
that all the possible good of each life shall be realized 
for other lives ; but it means also a higher number of 
births than of deaths ; that as long as the earth bears fruit 
abundantly, there shall be an increasing population to spur 
us on to effort. It means, in this particular matter, the 
redemption of women from too frequent child-bearing and 
too prolonged and too harassing care of children, that, in 
their full maturity after forty years of age, women as 
well as men may be free to contribute wealth and culture 
to the general store of riches and of knowledge. 

It means the reconstruction of criminals by education, 
and the prevention of criminals by the proper feeding, 
housing, and schooling of children. 

It means universal homes. 

It means the subordination of government, of business, 
and every other social activity of the present adults to 
the higher race interests of the young. ^ 

It means the conquest of the human mind by a new 
ideal, the highest as yet conceived, — the employment 
of this life as the means to a later, larger life ; in another 
phrase, education as religion ; and in yet another phrase, 
man as always the offspring of God. For it converts life 
into a university, a school of exceeding many and various 
opportunities radiating from one idea, — the possibility 
of a "far-off divine event " for each one of us. 

This is no new idea. It is not a new ideal. It is, how- 
ever, a most noteworthy illustration of the truth that 
seers prevision the ages of the remote future, for this 
ideal of Moses, of Isaiah, of Ezekiel, of Amos, and of 

1 " The greatest single factor in the development of the social and emo- 
tional aspects of morality is the natural selection of stocks that show 
increasing care for offspring." Tufts, " On Moral Evolution," in Studies 
in Philosophy and Psychology (Carman Memorial). 



484 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

Jesus has now become the common opinion of men : the 
thinkers have at length converted the multitude. We do 
not ask now whether an age of righteousness is desirable 
or how it is obtainable ; we know that it is desirable and 
that it is obtainable by education. Our inquiry is solely 
how to bring universal education, which is universal 
religion, into reality. For this extraordinary age is a con- 
geries of the heavens of which men have been dreaming 
in various lands throughout all history. The American 
is living in a new Jerusalem come down out of the heaven 
of spiritual life upon the earth of material things. It is 
not a perfect Jerusalem, for the perfect is ever before us, 
beckoning. And the great discovery is that there never 
was chaos, but always an eternally evolving cosmos.^ The 
most substantial are the immaterial principles, — the 
laws, the forces, the processes by which the earth is 
ribbed with rocks, the stars proceed in their courses, and 
the minds of men search after God. 

This procedure, therefore, — by which the physical is 
transformed into the psychical, by which the bodily 
activity of men becomes intelligent ; their intelligent 
activity becomes efficient in the production of material 
things, the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life ; 
their material wealth necessitates morality ; their moral 
disposition involves them in serious, scientific inquiry 
into the realities of Nature ; their science persists until 
it bases and bulwarks their arts ; their life of art becomes 
self-conscious in philosophy ; and their philosophy directs 
them to desire wholeness and unity of conduct, of soul, 
of the life personal and social, — this procedure from 
ignorance to wisdom is a formal and the normal evolu- 
tion of man, which evolution is education. 

Man becomes, then, his own supreme art-product, the 
maker of himself. Nature, which produces man and de- 
stroys him accidentally, it would seem, and recklessly, is 

* Duncan, The New Knowledge, part vii, chapter v. 



THE LINE OF MARCH 485 

conquered. There is no more death, but only life after 
life. Reason, which is the true nature of the soul, its 
reality, is the victor over all the enemies of life. 

" This world is God's workshop" ^ wherein He makes 
men for life elsewhere. To know this is to enter here 
upon the life eternal. 

1 Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit : Manhood. 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE MEANING OF LIFE 

Life is a warfare and the sojourn of a stranger. — Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts., ii, 17. 
Not to look onwards to the ideal life of man is to deny our birthright of mind. — 
Jefferies, Pageant of Summer. 

Adjustment has two sides. In one respect, it relates to the modification effected in the 
individual in order to suit itself to the external conditions of its environment. In the other 
respect it relates to the modifications effected in the environment to suit it to the individ- 
ual. — Harris, Preface, p. vi, in Judd, Genetic Psychology for Teachers. 

The only thing that is good is the Living Love that wills the blessedness of others. 
This is the true Good-in-itself , sought by all men. All things else — resolves, sentiments, 
actions, tendencies — share with this only derivatively the name of Good. Neither a 
realm of Truth nor a realm of Worth is prior as the initial reality. To finite cognition, the 
one unfolding movement of this reality appears in the three aspects of the good that is its 
end, the constructive impulse by which this end is attained, and the conformity to law 
that keeps the impulse in the path to that end. All the moral commands that, as sharply 
defined maxims, attract our attention are but a mechanism devised for its own realization 
by Creative Love. To this mechanism belong the universal, the class, and the state of 
things, — mere schemes for the establishment of truth and of order. Where we cannot 
reconcile the goodness and the omnipotence of God, there our finite intelligence has come 
to the Hmit of its tether; yet we may believe a solution exists, though we may not under- 
stand it. The true reality is and forever ought to be not Matter, and still less Idea, but 
the living personal spirit of God and the various personal Spirits of His creation. — 
LoTZE, Microcosmus (abridged, Hamilton-Jones's translation), pp. 717, 721-727. 

** Glad to go hence." Such is the verdict of most of 
thepersonswho have sat at the bedside of the dying, the 
verdict in all ages and lands, the verdict of ministers, 
physicians, counselors, and friends upon both men and 
women, " Glad to go hence." Here surely is matter for 
reflection and conclusion. Few men are afraid of death ^ 
as the battlefields and workshops of the world attest. 
Still less do women, staking life at every birth, fear death. 

1 " For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real 
wisdom, being a pretended knowledge of the unknown ; and no one knows 
whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, 
may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, 
which is a disgraceful kind of ignorance 1 " Plato [Socrates], Apology, 
i, 327 (after Jowett). 



THE MEANING OF LIFE 487 

But we do not desire it* We have accepted as a matter 
of common sense, of religion, and of philosophy alike the 
maxim of Bias, **So ought we to mete out this life as 
those who will live both much and little." Born without 
choice, we accept life as fate and are happiest in our 
reconciliation to our fate, whatever be its form.^ 

This acceptance is not confined to the working masses 
or to the leisure classes, but is common to all men ; and 
it is as desirable as it is common. It must not be con- 
fused with any proposed acceptance of some particular 
lot in life, which is neither common nor desirable. In 
this distinction lies the entire problem of education, 
both personal and social, for as there is an education of 
the individual, so by the way of the education of many 
individuals is there also an education of society. 

Usually caught and fastened inextricably in the insti- 
tutions, customs, conditions, and traditions of environ- 
ing humanity, the individual sees in death release from 
all his difficulties. It becomes to him, as it were, an abso- 
lution. Moreover, he sees in death the possibility of a 
new start, for he has learned that to escape from the 
snares, the traps, and the pitfalls that Nature and hu- 
manity set in the way of every man, one needs powers 
beyond those actually possessed. In the life after death, 
he sees the possibility of possessing these greater pow- 
ers, for men are not blind to the fact that success is 
merely a balance between difficulties and skills. Life 
is a battle, — he fails who cannot defeat circumstances, 
whose powers do not match his opportunities, for every 
situation is an opportunity. Consequently, our desire 
is not for easier situations, but for more insight, skill, en- 
ergy, endurance, courage, in dealing with them ; for more 

1 The last words of Henry Ward Beecher were, " Now comes the mys- 
tery." This expresses the common sense of millions who, conscious, die 
in peace. 

2 Rosenkranz, Philosophy of Education, final chapter. 



488 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

income, not for less expenditure ; for more life, not for 
less experience. Therefore, as soon as we know what 
education is, we desire it : knowing that undeveloped 
talent is like iron in the ore under ground and hoping 
that in us is the talent waiting discovery, development, 
and use. 

By its faith that in most men are talents awaiting dis- 
covery, development, and preparation for use, — the iron 
to be made into structural steel and the gold into cur- 
rent coin of exchange, — democracy celebrates human- 
ity, is the religion of humanity ; and establishes the 
school as the church or temple of this religion. But 
democracy is not yet fully self-conscious, or entirely es- 
tablished, or altogether victorious over its foes. There- 
fore, the school is incomplete, imperfectly evolved, not . 
yet transformed from the image in which it was origin- 
ally built. Nor as yet have enough able men worked 
out the solution of the problem of how much universal 
education really should accomplish. Nor does democracy 
quite understand or perfectly support the school in which 
this education is to be accomplished. Nor do we yet 
comprehend that for each one of us the entire meaning 
of life is education, nothing else being comparably worth 
while. 

Life is the end-in-itself, a centre with a circumference 
beyond the horizons of finite vision, a centre of a circle 
whose limits may no man set, a centre of a sphere 
revolving yet permanent in the universe of God ; but 
all the while an end-in-itself, all the while both forth- 
looking and introspective, the eternal contradiction of 
getting by giving, because this is the manner of life 
fashioned and followed by God Himself, of whom we 
know nothing whatever more than this, that because He 
is whole, one, perfect. He made us like Himself, being 
unable to do otherwise. 

This, then, is education, to reach out, to go forth, to 



THE MEANING OF LIFE 489 

give ; and thereby to grow. And, therefore, we hate what- 
ever confines us, often failing to see that such confine- 
ment may very well be for the purpose of causing us to 
develop in the round, harmoniously, completely, rather 
than to grow narrow, discordant, incomplete. Prohibi- 
tion, inhibition, sorrow, struggle, self-examination : these 
are the price of self-consciousness, of personality, of the 
education of the spirit. The method of God in making 
a man is evidently to be thorough ; to make not a mist 
or a shadow, but a solid. 

By none of the foregoing am I to be understood as 
defending for a moment or by a single word the evil 
that I know in the world ; or even to say that in the par- 
ticular instance, I understand it. Nor do I underestimate 
it, being inclined to see evil rather than good. But I 
will not disfigure these pages with the catalogue of these 
evils under the sun. There is iniquity that literally is 
infamous, not to be spoken, certainly not to be printed.^ 
I am entirely unable to understand the callous willing- 
ness to be rich amid poverty, innocently good amid vice, 
cheerfully learned amid ignorance ; but I can imagine 
that for reasons sufficient to Himself God establishes 
this present order of human society as a necessary stage 
toward a higher order. " It must needs be that offences 
come ; but woe to that man by whom the offence 
Cometh." ^ 

To assert that the whole world is but a school and 
that the entire meaning of life is education is not at all 
to assert that all life is to be spent in school or even in 
education directly by others : but it involves asserting 

^ The warning of Paul of things not to be named set a new example 
in the world : true to the psychology of suggestion and true to the neces- 
sary progress of mankind in decency and in charity. Romans^ Corinthi- 
ans^ passim. 

2 Jesus, Matthew, Gospel, xviii, 7. Particularly did the Master condemn 
one who sins against " little ones " : — " better that a millstone were 
hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea." 



490 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

that the importance of the School is far greater than 
even democratic society yet realizes. Education directed 
in schools short-circuits experience, anticipates and pre- 
pares for difficulties, and elevates as well as solidifies 
the soul for larger and higher usefulness ; but it cannot 
develop non-existent power, nor can it serve as substi- 
tute for the realities of the life outside of School, the life 
in the School being, however, as much a reality as any 
other. 

In this view, the School is a continuing institution : 
one no more "leaves off" education than religion or 
government. As the courts of government are always 
open for civil litigation and for criminal trial; as legisla- 
tion is periodical, and administration continual ; as the 
churches of religion hold regular and frequent sessions ; 
as every other social institution is for adults as well as 
youth : so the schools of education and of culture, its 
second power, will always be open, and to them from 
time to time men and women will resort for special pre- 
paration for the new opportunities of society or for larger 
preparation for the old. The individual will go in and 
out of the School when occasion offers, as matter of 
course, realizing, not merely knowing or perhaps but 
imagining, that in this manifold, multiform civilization, 
which progresses in complexity and in specialization with 
a rapidity beyond the dreams of yesterday,^ the useful 
man must in education equal the demands and the priv- 
ileges of his times. And the schools of education will 
multiply their forms, their courses, and their buildings, 
and will improve their methods, their personnel, and their 
organization to meet the social needs. Especially will 
the higher and the special schools — the universities, the 
institutes, the trade schools — improve and increase. 
Ever the rate of increase will grow until education 
catches up with civilization and conforms to the full 

1 Bryce, American Commonwealth, vol. i, p. 2. 



THE MEANING OF LIFE 491 

requirements of society : that State, Church, School, 
Family, Industry, and Culture shall be equal and coor- 
dinate universal institutions, and that each individual 
shall be fully prepared to do all really that he was born 
with the possible ability to do for God and for human- 
ity. It is this that is coming to pass, this that is break- 
ing up the present transitional economic regime, this 
that is the noblest aspiration to keep men alive and 
joyous in an age of vast trouble, of excessive change, 
and of straining readjustment ; for this enters into the 
heart of the meaning of life, which is that, in this pass- 
age in Time and Space, Society and Nature shall help 
the individual on his way through the eternities and the 
infinities. 

The meaning of life may be explicated by reviewing 
the cyclorama of its institutions and the history of its 
processes. Taking the facts as they are as evidence that 
so God wills them to be, and believing that as far as they 
injure neither the individual nor society they must be 
good, we must agree that the true life is always the life 
that shares most largely and freely in all their good.^ 
Such a review has been attempted in these pages, with 
an evaluation of the good things of life. The review and 
evaluation are suggested as logical consequence of "the 
idea of universal education. 

All the world is being created, corrected, and de- 
veloped by ideas. Each new idea is a revelation. Plato, 
who appears to have discovered this truth, made thereby 
a most important contribution to the thought of man. 
These truths express the infinite and are, therefore, 
essentially incomprehensible by the finite. They are not, 
however, for this cause incredible. From the finite as 
from a window, the human spirit looks out upon the 
infinite. 

In this book is organized an idea not wholly new. By 

1 Henderson, Education ajid the Larger Life, p. 370. 



492 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

bringing the latent into apparent reality, the potential 
into manifest power, education converts the possibility 
of each human being into actuality, lifts the child, 
otherwise a mere instrument of the natural forces of 
body and of soul, to the higher levels of personal and 
social culture, and thereby maintains civiUzation. A 
sound civilization tenderly cherishes education as its 
life-blood. Education that achieves its end, which is pre- 
paration for living at one's best, is formal and independ- 
ent and can be realized only by a formal and independent 
social institution, performing this function in a certain 
isolation from all other social institutions. In this form, 
the School constitutes a complete idea ; and the idea it- 
self takes on a certain newness that this book endeavors 
to explain. 

The idea of education as a perfectly differentiated, 
completely integral, and absolutely independent social 
institution appears rational and therefore authoritative. 
Making no appeal to sentiment, emotion, or enthusiasm, 
this idea seems to possess the intellectual power of 
organizing the disorganized facts, principles, customs, 
and traditions as expressed in the various schools of to- 
day. It appears to be critical only that it may be con- 
structive. Moreover, it withdraws from the field of 
conflict between those varied confused interests of man- 
kind which are not yet integrated as social institutions, 
our most precious interests, — our concern for posterity, 
and our desire that our own product and record shall 
not perish. And it seems also to interpret the true re- 
lations of education to the good and to the evil of civil- 
ization: the good it repeats and multiplies, the evil it 
encysts, corrects, or destroys. 

Again, this idea crowns with appropriate dignity what 
should be for civilized mankind a universal enterprise. 
History warrants the opinion that, in the absence of 
such dignity, education has failed to do for earlier civil- 



THE MEANING OF LIffE 493 

izations a work absolutely essential to their preservation. 
This work is to conspire with Nature in developing a 
sufficient number of sufficiently competent persons to 
maintain the particular civilization. And yet again this 
idea conforms to the modern faith that it is possible to 
find and to develop in youth many powers of body and 
of soul not suspected, even denied, by merely superficial 
observers. In other words, the idea is generally demo- 
cratic and, therefore, appeals to the highest article in 
the faith of man in humanity developed through genera- 
tions of undiscoverable number. By the universal, inde- 
pendent, systematic school, democracy intends seriously 
to help each and every individual to realize the most of 
himself, society the most of itself, and humanity as much 
as possible of its inherited, inheritable, and attainable 
likeness to God. 

Finally, the idea permits an evaluation and apprecia- 
tion of the motives, methods, and machinery of education 
that is impossible while the School is conceived as but 
a partial, dependent, subordinate, mediate, and in a certain 
aspect despised affair that concerns children only.^ By 
unity, the School assumes force and develops energy ; 
it therefore becomes plainly what hitherto only a few 
have desired, the copartner with religion, government, 
and family in establishing the intelligence, activity, and 
morality of mankind. 

This School is as yet only an idea, and we cannot 
criticise its actual working. However, it is a noteworthy 
and highly estimable quality of every idea that it antici- 
pates reality and interprets it in the light of the truth 
that shall be. In the ideal worlds of the novelist, of the 
poet, and of the philosopher are set forth and solved 

^ This other, old idea is the familiar one of the books. I am not writ- 
ing a polemic : if I were, I would cite a score of such books. I desire only 
to present an argument, — a white reasoning. If it gives light, I shall be 
glad : I hope that it gives no heat. 



494 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

many human problems ; and the solutions are more clear 
than those of actual life, and quite as final. Moreover, 
such solutions save many experiments. As Plato taught 
us, without the idea no thing and no relation of things 
have ever been or ever possibly can be. It is this, that, 
as Aristotle showed, lifts ideal truth above actuality and 
constitutes metaphysics as the cause of all the physical. 
Not less does modern thought assert that the p^y^ical 
or spiritual in man, Nature, and God transcend, con- 
dition, and create the physical or material. 

As for the working-out of the idea into actuality, 
what is offered here is only by way of suggestion and 
prognostication. The idea is already very common. Ten 
thousand minds are working it over; all the millions 
who are living in civilization are making it into history. 
This book at most brings the theme into the conscious- 
ness of many for consideration, discussion, and deliberate 
action. 

I have endeavored to reduce to concrete terms many 
opinions that otherwise would be general and therefore 
vague, basing my effort upon the law of Delboeuf, which 
may be summarized as follows : " Any phenomena, not 
translated into numbers, always leave on the mind the 
effect of mysticism." ^ I have endeavored also to express 
my opinions in accordance with the law of Lotze, which 
he stated in these terms : "How absolutely universal is 
the extent, how entirely subordinate the mission that 
mechanism plays in the world." In short, I have tried 
to show that complete education prepares for a com- 
pletely organized society with an increasing number and 
variety of social institutions and relations. 

The individual as a man must not be subordinated 
(helplessly adjusted) to society as an institution, but by 
exercise in it must be made sufficiently superior to 
society to be able to contribute to its life and progress. 

1 Quoted by Titchener, Experimental Psychology, vol. ii, title-page. 



THE MEANING OF LIFE 495 

The typical period for such education is from ten to 
twenty years of age and must be observed for all. 

The missing factor in all former civilizations (which 
have uniformly perished) has been universal education 
of the youth, both boys and girls, some for leadership, 
most for intelligent and hearty fellowship and following. 
That factor we should supply. All studies, exercises, 
and regimens must be evaluated in terms of their con- 
tributions to the building of the bodies and of the minds 
(or souls) of men for work and for happiness as social 
beings on this earth and as individual lives passing from 
eternity to eternity. 

Intellect, emotion, will, the three modes of mind, may 
be likened to a line of wire, forming a triangle ; through 
the wire passes life like an electric current ; at each 
angle, a relay battery (as it were of vitality from the 
body) sends new life into the circuit. The losses of life 
along the intellection stretch are due to incomplete or 
abandoned ideas ; along the emotion stretch, to diffused 
or rejected affections ; along the conation stretch, to in- 
herited or dissipated impulses. This mechanical analogy 
permits ideas to be considered as passing into affec- 
tions ; affections into intentions; intentions into ideas; 
ideas into intentions ; intentions into affections ; affec- 
tions into ideas. It also (mechanically) relates body to 
mind. Again, the doctrine here of the psychophysical 
parallelism is substantially this : Bodily vigor is a cur- 
rent of water, as it were, flowing at varying rates, in vary- 
ing widths and depths, while mental activity is a current 
of air, as it were, above the bodily current, resting upon 
it, and moving at varying rates, frictionally influenced in 
consciousness, in subconsciousness, and in unconscious- 
ness by the current upon which it rests. From concep- 
tion to death, soul and body are continually associated ; 
nor does man know which current is originally sprung 
from the other, or whether or not in origin and in end 



496 MOTIVES AND VALUES IN EDUCATION 

they are or are not one. At death, the bodily force may 
pass with the spiritual from the material body ; as in- 
deed both forces may enter at conception. 

One may not deliberately take partial views of educa- 
tion and retain the integrity of his soul. In this book, 
therefore, I have spoken freely of political, religious, eco- 
nomic, and cultural society, and of the conditions of the 
personal life. It is valueless to think of education save 
in terms of the ideal. To educate for society as it is is 
not to educate, but to habituate, and, at least in some part, 
to inoculate with the virus of indifferentism.^ One who 
is so instructed as to beUeve that everything that is in 
himself, in others, and in society is right, must be im- 
mune to virtues, to ideals, and to righteousness, and cal- 
lous towards pity and charity. Against the stoicism of 
the educational schools that accept this world as their 
lord, I raise this protest.^ 

In the terms of ideals, I cite six as absolute : intelli- 
gence, efficiency, morality, science, art, and philosophy ; 
these seem to form an ascending scale. The first three 
seem to be absolutely essential to education, the last 
three to culture. 

As the physician discharges his patient when cured, 
so the educator should discharge his pupil only when 
educated. Moreover, as the physician is ready always 
to prescribe and to care for his patient, so the educator 
should always be ready to receive and to assist his 
pupil. The graduation of the School must be made syn- 
chronous with the completion of the formal education, 

i " The first task of every school is to educate the child, not to prepare 
for life." Hughes, The Making of Citizens, p. 391. 

2 The world as lord is the standard of hypocrites and of men-of-the 
world alike. They masquerade in all guises : but they uncover to one test. 
•' Now is the accepted time [for reform] : now is the day of salvation." 
And they (whom Jesus perfectly understood) reply, "Yes, things should 
be better, but — " And thereby they lose their own souls. And sincere 
men and men-of-all-time can only grieve for them and pass on to duty. 



THE MEANING OF LIFE 497 

but it should not be synonymous with complete education, 
a thing impossible before senility sets in. Such an achieve- 
ment over the poverty, the ignorance, and the malice of 
many means yet a long campaign, with hard fighting. 

Incidentally, all lay boards of control for educational 
affairs will be done away ; and the School under profes- 
sional control will rise coordinate with the Church. A 
similar change will take place in the State, in which the 
laity will control only in financial matters. Legislation as 
well as education is an affair for experts to devise ; and 
for the people to accept or to reject by accepting or reject- 
ing the legislators themselves, as they accept or reject 
physicians, lawyers, and ministers in the free churches. 

The School differentiated from other social institu- 
tions and so integrated can face seriously the question, 
" Whether among national manufactures that of souls of 
a good quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly 
lucrative one. " ^ It will enable society to free itself 
from the lost " little ones," who are a " misery to them- 
selves, a misery to the community, a disgrace to civiliza- 
tion, and an outrage on Christianity," ^ and who degen- 
erate into the criminals, the prostitutes, the adventurers, 
the paupers, and the lunatics, perilous to themselves 
and to all of us. 

The more we do for the school, the more we shall ex- 
pect from it : and the more we expect from it, the more 
we should do for it. American society has now reached 
the question whether many of its evils have become too 
great to be considered negligible any longer or are re- 
mediable by education extended far beyond the present 
range. Remedied they must be, unless the decline be 
allowed to set in. 

1 Ruskin, [Into this Last, § 40. In the light of all our "new know- 
ledge," this proposition is no longer fanciful, but has become obligatory as 
the first business of mankind. 

2 Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following works are suggested to emphasize either by agree- 
ment or by opposition the various propositions and accessory con- 
siderations of the text. In this sense, and in this only, they constitute 
a bibliography of the subject. 

Only a few books in foreign languages are included. Scholars able 
to handle a complete bibliography irrespective of language will not 
require even this brief list. These few are included as suggestions of 
a great body of European authorities. 

It should be obvious that certain familiar standard works are 
cited merely to record explicitly what line of reasoning I have pre- 
ferred to follow: others are cited because they are the significant 
curiosities of their respective fields. The brevity of the list seems to 
render unnecessary more than one citation of a work. 

I. NATURAL SCIENCE 
I. Theory. 

Baldwin, Development and Evolution. 

Collins, Epitome of [Spencer's] Synthetic Philosophy. 

Darwin, Origin of Species. 

Descent of Man. 

Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. 
Drummond, Ascent of Man. 

Natural Law in the Spiritual World. 
Duncan, The New Knowledge. 
Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy. 

A Century of Science. 
Howison, Limits of Evolution. 
Jordan, Footnotes to Evolution. 
Lank ester, The Kingdom of Man. 
Le Dantec, The Origin of Life. 
Mivart, Contemporary Evolution. 
Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence. 

Animal Behavior. 

Habit and Instinct. 
Saleeby, Evolution the Master-Key. 
Schmidt, Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism. 

Mammalia in Primitive Times. 



502 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Spencer, Synthetic Philosophy. 
Steiner, Scientific Papers. 
Strong, Lectures on the Methods of Science. 
Tyler, Whence and Whither of Man. 
Vignoli, Myth and Science. 
Wallace, Darwinism. 
Applications and Extensions. 
Bagehot, Physics and Politics. 

Draper, History of the Conflict between Science and Religion. 
Huxley, Science and Culture. 

Methods and Results. 

Lay Sermons. 
* O'Shea, Education as Adjustment. 
Shaler, The Individual. 
Spencer, Education. 
White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology. 

II. SOCIAL SCIENCE 
History. 

Acton, Study of History. 
Adams, Civilization during the Middle Ages. 
Baring-Gould, The Tragedy of the CcBsars. 
Breasted, History of Egypt. 

Ancient Records. 
Bryce, History of Latin Christianity. 
Buckle, History of Civilization in England. 
Crozier, History of Intellectual Development on the Lines of 

Evolution. 
Draper, The Intellectual Development of Europe. 
Droysen, Principles of History. 
Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization. 
Ely, Evolution of Industrial Society. 
Featherman, Social History of the Races of Mankind. 
Garvey, Manual of Human Culture. 
Hilquit, History of Socialism in the United States. 
lies. Flame, Camera, and Electricity. 
Lippert, Allgemeine Geschichte des Priesterthums. 
Lubbock, Origin of Civilization. 
Maspero, Dawn of Civilization. 

Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria. 
Morgan, Ancient Society. 
Pitt-Rivers, Evolution of Culture. 
Rand (editor), Economic History since 1763. 
Ratzel, History of Mankind. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 503 

Schouler, Americans of 1776, 
Simcox, Primitive Civilization. 
Starr, Some First Steps in Human Progress. 
Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution. 
Wallace, The Wonderful Century (19th). 
Webb, History of Trades Unionism. 
Wright, Man and the Glacial Period. 
2. Social Institutions. 
a. Property. 

Commons, Distribution of Wealth. 

Hadley, Economics ; an Account of the Relations between 
Private Property and Public Welfare. 

Laveleye, Primitive Property. 

Letourneau, Property, its Origin and Development. 

Pollock, The Land Laws. 

Proudhon, What is Property ? 

Spahr, Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States. 

Systems of Land Tenure, Cobden Club Lectures, 
h. Family. 

Besant, Marriage. 

Birney, Childhood. 

Brandt, Five Hundred and Seventy-four Deserters and Their 
Families, Report, New York, 1905. 

Chamberlain, The Child: A Study in the Evolution of Man. 
The Child and Childhood in Folkthought. 

Devas, Studies of Family Life. 

Finck, Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. 

Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions. 

Martin, The Luxury of Children. 

Parsons, The Family: an Ethnographical and Historical 
Outline. 

Riberolles, Du Divorce par Consentement. 

Schouler, Treatise on the Law of the Domestic Relations. 

Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children. 

Starcke, The Primitive Family in Origin and Development. 

Thwing, The Family : an Historical and Social Study. 

Westermarck, History of Human Marriage. 
c. Church. 

Carroll, Religious Forces of the United States. 

Lippert, Allgemeine Geschichte des Priesterthums. 

Mathews, Social Teaching of Jesus. 

Prall, State and Church. 

Schaff, Church and State in America. 



504 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

d. State. 

Amos, Science of Law. 

Science oj Politics. 
Aristotle, Politics. 
Bluntschli, Theory of the State. 
Butler, True and False Detnocracy. 
Greenleaf, Law oj Evidence. 
Hart, Actual Government. 
Hobbes, Leviathan. 
Holmes, The Common Law. 
Holt, On the Civic Relations. 
Lecky, Liberty and Democracy. 
Maine, Ancient Law. 
Pollock, Science of Politics. 
Seeley, Introduction to Political Science, 

e. School. 

Butler, The Meaning of Education. 

Dewey, The School and Society. 

Dopp, Place of Industries in Elementary Education. 

Elslander, Education au Point de Vue Sociologique. 

Henderson, Education and the Larger Life. 

Hughes, The Making of Citizens : A Study in Comparative 

Education. 
Taylor, Public School Laws, 1892. 
/. Occupation. 

1. Industrial. 

Channing, Elevation of the Working Classes. 

George, Progress and Poverty. 

Oilman, Human Work. 

Mallock, Labor and the Popidar Welfare. 

Progress of the Century (19th), New York, 1901. 

Smiles, Self -Help. 

Webb, Industrial Democracy. 

2. Cultural. 

Congress of Arts and Sciences (St. Louis), Boston, 1904. 

Hamerton, The Intellectual Life. 

Harper, The Trend in Higher Education. 

McKenna (editor), Education and Professions of Women. 

Mitchell, The Past in the Present : What is Civilization ? 

Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class. 

Youmans (editor). The Culture demandedby Modern Life. 
g. Business. 

Banks, White Slaves. 

Cadbury, Matheson, and Shaun, Women^s Work and Wages. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 505 

Campbell, Women Wage -Earners. 
Carnegie, Empire of Business. 
Ghent, Our Benevolent Feudalism. 
Gibbin, Economic and Industrial Progress. 
Gilman, Methods of Industrial Peace. 
Mayo-Smith, Statistics and Economics. 
Rae, Sociological Theory of Capital. 
Veblen, The Business Man. 
Walker, Political Economy. 
General Theory. 

Abbott, The Rights of Man. 

Bohm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of his System. 

Bosanquet, Aspects of the Social Question. 

Brooks, The Social Unrest. 

Bryce, The American Commonwealth. 

Carpenter, Civilization, its Cause and Cure. 

Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order. 

De Brath, Foundations of Success. 

De Tocqueville, Democracy in America. 

Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. 

Forrest, Development of Western Civilization. 

Giddings, Principles of Sociology. 

Gumplowicz, Outlines of Sociology. 

Hauser, U Enseignement des Sciences Sociales. 

Kidd, Principles of Western Civilization. 

Lane, Level of Social Motion. 

Le Bon, Psychology of Socialism. 

Essais et Melanges Sociologiques. 
Maine, Early History of Institutions. 

Dissertation on Early Law and Custom. 
Mallock, Aristocracy and Evolution. 
Patten, New Basis of Civilization. 

Theory of Social Forces. 
Posada, Theories Modernes sur les Origines de la Famille, de 

la Societe et de VEtat. 
Ross, Social Control. 
Small, General Sociology. 
Spencer, Social Statics. 

First Principles. 

Descriptive Sociology. 
Stein, Die Sociale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie. 
Tarde, Social Laws. 

Tylor, Anthropology: Introduction to Study of Man and 
Civilization. 



5o6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ward, Psychic Factors in Civilization. 
Outlines of Sociology. 
Dynamic Sociology. 
Applied Sociology. 

Wright, Practical Sociology. 
i. Sex Theory. 

Ellis, Man and Woman. 

Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage: Eine Naturwissenschaftliche, 
Psychologische, Hygienische und Sociologische Studie fiir 
Gebildete. 

Thomas, Sex and Society. 
j. Social Pathology. 

Bloch, The Future of War. 

Davenport, Hill, and Fowke, Children of the State. 

Drahms, The Criminal: A Social Study. 

Ellis, The Criminal. 

Ferri, Sociologia Criminate. 

Folks, Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children. 

Gross, Criminal Psychology. 

Henderson, Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents. 

Hunter, Poverty. 

Ingersoll, Crime against Criminals. 

Kellor, Experimental Psychology ; Delinquents. 
Out of Work. 

Lombroso, Delitti Vecchi e Delitti Nuovi. 

Lydstone, Diseases of Society. 

Morrow, Social Diseases. 

Morselli, Suicide. 

O'Dea, Suicide. 

Russell and Rigby, The Making of Criminals. 

Schrenck, Kriminal Psychologische und Psychopathogische 
Studien. 

Warner, American Charities. 

White, Problems of a Great City. 

Wines, Punishment and Reformation. 
k. Urban and Rural Life. 

Booth, Life and Labor in London. 

Emerson, Society and Solitude. 

Fairchild, Rural Wealth and Rural Welfare. 

Graham, The Rural Exodus. 

Howe, The City the Hope of Democracy. 

Riis, How the Other Half Lives. 

Smith, Village Life in China. 
Chinese Characteristics. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 507 

Williams, The Middle Kingdom. 
Woods (editor), The City Wilderness. 
Americans in Process. 
Zueblin, A Decade of Civic Development. 
I. Races. 

Commons, Immigrants in America. 

Deniker, Races of Men. 

Lefevre, Race and Language. 

Ripley, Races of Europe. 

Sergi, The Mediterranean Race. 

Sinclair, Aftermath of Slavery. 

Washington, Future of the American Negro. 

III. HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY 

a. Theory. 

Campbell, Differences in the Nervous Organization of Men 
and Women. 

Cunningham, Textbook of Human Anatomy. 

Donaldson, Growth of the Brain, a Study of the Nervous Sys- 
tem in Relation to Education. 

Foster, Textbook of Human Physiology. 

Foster and Balfour, Elements of Embryology. 

Geddes and Thompson, Evolution of Sex. 

Hibbert, Life and Energy. 

Loeb, Physiology of the Brain. 

Lourbet, Le Probleme des Sexes. 

McMurrich, Development of the Human Body. 

Martin, The Human Body. 

Morris, Human Anatomy. 

Oppenheim, Development of the Child. 

Rowe, Physical Nature of the Child. 

Shafer (editor), Human Physiology. 

Walker, Human Physiology. 

Warner, Nervous System of the Child. 
Study of Children. 

Wilson, The Cell in its Development and Inheritance. 

b. Pathology. 

Gould, Biographical Clinics. 

Ireland, The Blot on the Brain: Studies in History and Psy- 
chology. 
Through the Ivory Gate : Studies in History and Psy- 
chology. 
Mental Affections of Children. 
Mitchell, Nerve Paralysis. 
Neurasthenia. 



5o8 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ranney, Eye-Strain in Health and Disease. 
Sachs, Nervous Diseases of Children. 

c. Psychophys.ics. 

Calderwood, Relations of Mind and Brain. 

Carpenter, Mental Physiology. 

Dresser, Health and the Inner Life. 

Manaceine, Sleep : its Physiology, Pathology, Hygiene, and 

Psychology. 
Marwedel, Conscious Motherhood. 
Maudsley, Physiology of Mind. 
Pathology of Mind. 
Responsibility in Mental Disease. 
Prayer, The Senses and the Will. 
Rogers, Parallelism of Mind and Body. 
Scripture, The New Psychology. 
Strong, Why the Mind has a Body. 

d. Hygiene. 

Abbott, Hygiene of Transmissible Disease. 

Blaikie, How to Get Strong. 

Curtis, Nature and Health. 

Hancock, The Physical Culture Life. 

Hutchinson, Food and Dietetics. 

Lagrange, Physiology of Bodily Exercise. 

Le Bosquet, Personal Hygiene. 

Lusk, Science of Nutrition. 

Mackenzie, Medical Inspection of School Children. 

Marcy, Movement. 

Parke, Hygiene, with American Supplement. 

Sedgwick, Principles of Sanitary Science and the Public Health. 

Shaw, School Hygiene. 

Uffelman, Domestic Hygiene of the Child. 

e. Heredity. 

Guyau, Education and Heredity. 

Horrige, Dynamic Aspects of Nutrition and Heredity. 

Patten, Heredity and Social Progress. 

Weismann, Essays on Heredity. 

Woods, Heredity in Royalty. 

f. Therapeutics. 

Diefendorfer, Clinical Psychiatry (based on Krapelin, Lehrbuch 

der Psychiatrie). 
Hare, Practical Therapeutics. 
Mitchell, Doctor and Patient. 

g. Applications. 

Halleck, Education of the Central Nervous System. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 509 

Maclaren, Physical Education. 
O'Shea, Dynamic Factors in Education. 
Thompson, Sex in Education. 
Tyler, Growth and Education. 

IV. PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY 

See also Human Physiology : Psychophysics 

Ladd, Elements of Physiological Psychology. 
Morgan, Introduction to Comparative Psychology. 
Sanford, Experimental Psychology. 
Titchener, Outlines of Psychology. 

Experimental Psychology. - 
Wundt, Human and Animal Psychology. 

V. PSYCHOLOGY 

a. General. 

Angell, Psychology. 

Baldwin, Mental Development. 

Bowne, Introduction to Psychological Theory. 

Calkins, Introduction to Psychology. 

Davis, Elements of Psychology. 

Dewey, Psychology. 

Galton, Inquiry into Human Faculty. 

Halleck, Psychology and Psychic Culture. 

Herbart, Textbook of Psychology (Smith, transl.). 

Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution. 

Hudson, Evolution of the Soul. 

James, Psychology (advanced course). 

Kiilpe, Outlines of Psychology. 

Royce, Outlines of Psychology. 

Stout, Groundwork of Psychology. 

Analytical Psychology. 
Sully, Outlines of Psychology. 
Thorndike, Elements of Psychology. 
Witmer, Analytic Psychology. 

b. Epochal. 

Compayre, Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child. 
Later Infancy of the Child. 

Hall, Adolescence : its Psychology and its Relations to Physio- 
logy, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Edu- 
cation. 

King, Psychology of Child Development. 

Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child Study. 



5IO BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Sully, Studies oj Childhood. 
Tracy, Psychology oj Childhood. 

c. Special. 

Adams, The Esthetic Experience : its Meaning in a Function. 

Carrel, Analysis of Human Motival Psychology. 

Gallon, Hereditary Genius. 

Jastrow, Psychology of the Unconscious. 

McCosh, The Emotions. 

Maeterlinck, The Buried Temple. 

Marholm, Psychology of Woman. 

Norton, Studies in Philosophy and Psychology : The Intellect- 
ual Element in Music. 

Rosmini, Origin of Ideas. 

Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing. 

Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and 
JEsthetics. 

Weininger, Sex and Character. 

d. Application. 

Bagley, The Educative Process. 

Baldwin, Psychology applied to the Art oj Teaching. 

Betts, Mind and Education. 

De Garmo, Interest and Education. 

Dexter and Garlick, Psychology in the Schoolroom. 

Harris, Psychological Foundations of Education. 

Home, Psychological Principles of Education. 

James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Life's Ideals. 

Judd, Genetic Psychology for Teachers. 

Le Bon, Psychologic de V Education. 

McClellan, Applied Psychology. 

Marion, Legons de Psychologic appliquee a V Education. 

Mulliner, Application oj Psychology to Education. 

Miinsterberg, Psychology and Lije. 

Psychological Revival : Educational Values, U. S. Bureau of 

Education, 1896. 
Thorndike, Educational Psychology. 
Human Nature Club. 

VI. PHILOSOPHY 

a. History. 

Erdmann, History oj Philosophy. 
Hoffding, History oj Philosophy. 
Kiilpe, Introduction to Philosophy. 
Perry, Approach to Philosophy. 
Rogers, Student's History oj Philosophy. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 511 

Turner, History of Philosophy. 
Ueberweg, History of Philosophy. 
Weber, History of Philosophy. 
Windelband, History of Philosophy. 

b. General Theory. 

Bacon, Novum Organon. 

Caldwell, Schopenhauer's System in its Philosophical Signifi- 
cance. 
Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy. 
Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. 
Dewhurst, The Investment of Truth. 
Dorman, Ignorance. 
Fiske, Through Nature to God. 
Griggs, The New Humanism. 
Hoffding, The Problems of Philosophy. 
Hyde, Practical Idealism. 

Knight, Varia : Studies on Problems of Philosophy and Ethics. 
Lotze, Microcosmus. 
Naden, Induction and Deduction. 
Otto, Naturalism and Religion. 
Perrin, Evolution of Knowledge. 
Plato, PhcBdo. 

Crito. 

Republic. 

Laws. 
Royce, World and Individual: Nature, Man, and the Moral 

Order. 
Seth and Haldane (editors). Essays in Philosophical Criticism. 
Sturt, Personal Idealism. 
Tyler, The Whence and Whither of Man. 
Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism. 
W^atson, Philosophy of Kant (abridged). 

c. Logic. 

Baldwin, Thought and Things: Genetic Logic. 
Fichte, Science of Knowledge. 
Miiller, Science of Thought. 

d. Ethics. 

Alexander, Moral Order and Progress : Ethical Definitions. 
Aristotle, Ethics. 

Baldwin, Mental Development: Social and Ethical Interpre- 
tations. 
Bosanquet, Psychology of the Moral Self. 
Brentano, Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong. 
Coit (editor), The Message of Man. 



512 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Duprat, Morals : A Treatise upon the Psychological Bases of 

Ethics. 
Fite, An Introductory Study of Ethics. 
Gore, Scientific Basis of Morality. 
Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution. 
Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct. 
Levy-Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science. 
Mezes, Ethics Descriptive and Explanatory. 
Mill, Utilitarianism. 

Moulton, The Moral System of Shakespeare. 
Muirhead, Philosophy of Life. 
Nash, Genesis of the Social Conscience. 
Nietzsche, Gettealogy of Morals. 

Thus Spake Zarathustra. 

Uebermensch. 
Paulsen, System of Ethics. 
Pearson, Ethic of Freethought. 
Royce, Studies of Good and Evil. 
Schmidt, Ethik der Alten Griechen, 
Scott, Heredity and Morals. 
Seth, Study of EtJucal Principles. 
Sheldon, Duties in the Home. 
Taylor, The Problem of Conduct. 
Thilly, Introduction to Ethics. 
Watt, Study of Social Morality. 
Wundt, Ethics. 

e. ^Esthetics. 

Bascom, ^Esthetics : or the Science of Beauty. 

Bosanquet, History of JEsthetic. 

Day, Science of ^Esthetics : Nature, Kind, LawSj and Uses of 
Beauty. 

La Brouste, Philosophic des Beaux Arts. 

Lotze, Outlines of Esthetics. 

Saintsbury, History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Eu- 
rope. 

f. Application. 

Home, Philosophy of Education. 
Rosenkranz, Philosophy of Education. 

g. Speculative. 

Alden, A Study of Death. 

James, Human Immortality. 

McConnell, Evolution of Immortality. 

Meyers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. 

Ostwald, Individuality and Immortality. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 5^3 

Royce, The Conception of Immortality. ^ 

Stockwell, Evolution of Immortality. 
Stone, A Practical Study of the Soul. 

VII. RELIGION 

a. History. 

Beecher, Conflict of Ages. 

Blanchard, Twentieth Century Church in Early Christian 
Conditions. 

Fisher, History of the Christian Church. 

Hyde, Fro7n Epicurus to Christ. 

Menzies, History of Religion. 
b Theory. 

Adler, A Religion based on Ethics. 

Baxter, Christian Ethics. 

Browne, Christian Morals. 
Religio Medici. 

Clifford, Ethics of Religion. 

Decline of Religious Belief. 

Ethics and Religion, A Collection of Essays, London, 1900. 

Fichte, Critique of Religion. 

James, Varieties of Religious Experience. 

Martineau, A Study of Religion. 
Spiritual Growth. 

Miiller, Science of Religion. 

Sterrett, The Freedom of Authority. 

Taylor, Holy Living. 

Tolstoi, My Religion. 

World's Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893. 

c. Criticism. 

Adams, Church and Popular Education. 

The Bible in the Public Schools. Cincinnati, Report, 1870. 

Mathews, The Church and the Changing Order. 

Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the^Social Crisis. 

Selleck, New Appreciation of the Bible. 

Waring, Christianity and its Bible. 

d. Application. 

Barrow, Resist not Evil. 

Herman, Faith and Morals. 

Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Question. 

Stevens, The Teaching of Jesus. 



514 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

VIII. EDUCATION 
a. History. 

1. General and National. 

Boone, Education in the United States : its History. 

Brown, The Making of Our Elementary Schools. 

Browning, Introduction to History of Educational Theories. 

Compayre, A History of Education. 

Davidson, A History of Education. 

Dexter, A History of Education in the United States. 

Kehr, Geschichte der Methodik. 

Martin, The Chinese : their Education, Philosophy, and Let- 
ters. 

Monroe, Textbook of the History of Education. 
Sourcebook of the History of Education. 

Painter, A History of Education. 

Schreiber, Das Buch vom Kinde, ein Sammelwerk fur die 
ivichtigsten Fragen der Kindheit. 

Thwing, History of Higher Education in America. 

2. Epochal and Special. 

Butler (editor), Education in the United States, 1900, 

Davidson, Education of the Greek People. 

Oilman, Launching a University. 

Johnson, Old Time Schools and School Books. 

Magnus (editor). National Education, a Symposium ; Es- 
says toward a Constructive Policy {British). 

Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. 

Rice, Public School System of the United States. 

Spiers, School System of the Talmud. 

Woodward, Education during the Renaissance. 

Zimmer, Methods of Education in America. 
h. Description and Criticism. 

Adams, Some Famous American Schools. 
Birdseye, Individual Training in our Colleges. 
Educational Policy of the State of India. Report, 1900. 
Klemm, European Schools. 
Hughes, Schools at Home and Abroad. 
Parsons, French Schools through American Eyes. 
Paulsen, German Universities. 
Seeley, Common School System of Germany. 
Smith, Rural Schools, U. S. Bureau of Education, 1884. 
Thirteen Essays on Education by the XIII. London, 1891. 
Thomas, History and Prospects of British Education in Ger- 
many. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 515 

Washington, Tuskegee and its Work. 
Whewell, Principles oj English University Education. 
Winch, Notes on German Schools, 
e. Theory. 
I. General. 

Barnard, Pestalozzi and his Educational System. 
Blow, Symbolic Education. 
Boone, Science oj Education. 

Bosanquet, Education 0} the Young in the Republic oj Plato. 
Buchner, Kant's Educational Theory. 
Burnet, Aristotle on Education. 
Clarke, Selj-Cidture. 
Demolins, VEducation Nouvelle. 
Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum. 
Hadley, Education oj the American Citizen. 
Hanus, Educational Aims and Educational Values. 
Henderson, Jefjerson's Views on Public Education. 
Herbart, Science oj Education. 

Holman, Education : Introduction to Principles and Psycho- 
logical Foundations. 
Keating, Great Didactic oj Comenius. 
Lowell, Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 
Mason, School Education. 
Maurice, Learning and Working. 
Milton, Tractate on Education. 

Nettleship, Theory oj Education in the ''Republic'' oj Plato. 
O'Shea, Education as Adjustment. 

Dynamic Factors in Education. 

Palmer, The New Education. 

Parker, Talks to Teachers. 

Sargent, Physical Education. 

Scott, Organic Education. 

Search, An Ideal School. 

Spalding, Means and Ends oj Education. 

Welton, Logical Bases oj Education. 
2. Epochal. 

Barnard, The Kindergarten and Child Culture. 

De Garmo, Principles oj Secondary Education. 

Gilman, University Problems. 

Gordy, A Broader Elementary Education. 

Hyde, The College Man and the College Woman. 

Jacobi, Primary Education. 

Keith, Elementary Education. 

Peabody, Lectures to Kinder gartners. 



5i6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Thwing, College Administration. 

Wiggin and Smith, The Republic oj Childhood. 
3. Special. 

Britton, Intensive Study of the Causes oj Truancy. 

Burstall, Education oj Girls in the United States. 

Ham, Mind and Hand, Manual Training the Chiej Factor 
in Education. 

Hecker, Scientific Education. 

Herrick, Meaning and Practice oj Commercial Education. 

Industrial Education: U. S. Department of Labor, 1893. 

MacArthur, Education in Relation to Manual Industry. 

Scott, Nature Study and the Child. ^ 

Tadd, New^ Methods in Education. 

Vanderlip, Education and Business. 

Ware, Educational Foundations oj Trade and Industry. 

Warrington, Agricultural Science : its Place in a University 
Education. 

Woodward, Manual Training in Education. 
d. Social Aspects. 

Adams, Three Phi Beta Kappa Addresses. 
Ashbee, A Few Chapters in Workshop Reconstruction and Citi- 
zenship. 
Button, Social Phases oj Education in the School and the Home. 
Eliot, More Money jor the Public Schools. 
Gilbert, The School and its Lije. 
Hanus, A Modern School. 
King, School Recreations and Amusements. 
Palmer, Higher Education and a Common Language. 
Royce, Deterioration and Race Education. 
Vincent, The Social Mind and Education. 

IX. THE ARTS 

a. General Theory. 

Barnard, Science and Art. 

Caird, University Addresses (on science and art). 

Clarke, Art and Industry. 

Guyau, L'Art au Point du Vue Sociologique. 

Nisbet, Where Art Begins. 

Noyes, The Gate oj Appreciation. 

Ruskin, Unto This Last. 

Crown oj Wild Olive. 

Munera Pidveris. 

The Eagle's Nest. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY Si7 

Stevenson, The Gate Beautiful. 

Sturgis, A Study of the Artist's Way of Working. 

Tolstoi, What is Art ? 

b. History. 

Gross, Beginnings of Art. 

Haddon, Evolution of Art. 

Hirn, Origins of Art. 

Waldstein, Study of Art in Universities. 

c. Literature. 

1. Language. 

Trench, Study of Words. 

Whitney, Life and Growth of Language. 

2. AppHcation. 

Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. 
Lanier, Principles of Poetry. 
Loliee, Comparative Literature. 
Posnett, Comparative Literature. 
Stedman, Poets of America. 

d. Music. 

Parry, Evolution of tJte Art of Music. 
Henderson, Story of Music. 

Modern Musical Drift. 

e. Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. 

Eidlitz, Nature and Function of Art, especially Architecture. 
Morris, Architecture, Industry, and Wealth. 
Robinson, Modern Civic Art. 
Ross, Theory of Pure Design. 
Ruskin, Modern Painters. 

Principles of Art Education. 

Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
Van Pelt, A Discussion of Composition as applied to Architecture. 
/. AppHcation. 

Morris, Signs of Change. 



X. WORLD AND AGE 

Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace. 
Beecher, Life Thoughts. 

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 
Birrell, Obiter Dicta. 
Bosanquet, Essays and Definitions. 
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. 
Donald, Expansion of Religion. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Emerson, Man the Reformer. 

Conduct oj Life : Fate. 
Francke, German Ideals of To-day. 
Gordon, Social Ideals of Tennyson. 
Jefferies, The Story of my Heart. 
Lowell, Democracy. 
Miinsterberg, The Atnericans. 
Nordau, Degeneration. 

Sterling, Essays and Tales : Thoughts and Images. 
Wendell, American Ideals. 

XI. BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Columbia University Btdletin, Books on Education. 
Educational Reviezv, Annual Bibliographies, New York State 

Library Annual Reports. 
Encyclopcedia Britannica (ninth and tenth (combined) editions). 
Hall, Bibliography of Education. 
Monroe, Bibliography of Education. 
Poolers Index to Periodical Literature. 
Reports, National Educational Association. 
Reports, United States Bureau of Education. 



INDEX 



i 



INDEX 



Abraham, 72. 

Academic freedom. See Freedom, aca- 
demic. 
Academy, the word, 116, 
Acquired characteristics. Sefe Charac- 
teristics, acquired. 
Activity, perils of unintelligent, 243- 
245 ; desire of children for productive, 
252, 253 ; result to home, from loss 
of industrial, 253. 
Acton, Lord, the notes to his Study 
of History, 329 n. ; quotation from, 
377; his Study of History, quoted, 
407. 
Addison, Joseph, his Cato, quoted, 

70. 
Administration, school, 183; dangers 

in, 191, 192. 
Adolescence, secondary, 15,16; changes 
of, 375, 376; primary motives man- 
ifested in, 446. 
Adults, primary motives manifested 

in, 446. 
Advice, sources of good, 81. 
^schylus, 72. 

Alexander the Great, 71, 249. 
Altruism, egoism and, 479, 480, 
Ambition, intensified by poverty, 98. _ 
America, temper of the present age in, 
out of harmony with historical educa- 
tion, 139, 140 ; delusion regarding her 
many cities, 450 n., 451 n. 
Americanization of immigrants, 44. 
Amiel, Henri Fred6ric, his Journal, 

quoted, 470 n. 
Animal spirits, as a bar to education, 

no. 
Animals, educability of, 4. 
Anthropology, certain facts of, beyond 

our knowledge, 61, 62. 
Apperception, 209. 

Appropriations, school, limits set to, 

134 ; increase in, necessary, 438-441. 

Aristotle, 26, 72, 72 n., 142, 352, 353. 

Arithmetic, moral teaching of, 392 ; 

not a proper study for children, 405, 

406. 

Arnold, Matthew, his Sick Man of 

Bokhara, quoted, 13 ; his The Better 

Part, quoted, 74 n .; quotation from, 

437 "• 
Art, Plato's distinction between skill 
and, 136 n.; relation between science 



and, 141, 412, 413 ; subjects belonging 
to, 165 ; subdivisions of, 165 ; purpose 
of the school arts, 165-167 ; its rela- 
tion to efficiency, 265, 392, 424 ; dis- 
tinction between occupation and, 302 ; 
vastness of the field of, 329, 330, 413 ; 
the world not concerned with, 330 ; 
tyranny of, 331; coalescing of one with 
another, 332 ; its originating force, 
332, 334 ; without individuality, 334; 
Its relation to life, 334, 335, 336, 337; 
the duty of society towards, 335, 336 ; 
training for women in, 336 ; democracy 
of, 337 ; elements entering into the 
technique of, 338, 339 ; triumphs of, 
higher than those of science, 339 ; 
the test of pseudo-art, 340 ; a mental 
quality or method, 385, 386 ; modesty 
of, 402 ; inappropriateness of, in the 
formal education of children, 412 ; 
difficulty of classifying, 413 ; the 
lesser, suited to children, 414, 415; 
higher values of, 416. 
Artist, the, relation between the arti- 
san and, 302, 332, 333 ; obligations of, 
329, 330 ; method, of, 333, 334 ; crea- 
tive moods of, 339. 
Athens, the morality of, 278. 
Augustine, St., quoted, 82; his Hom- 
ilies, quoted, i59n. . _ 
Automobiles, French and American, 

335- 
Avarice, 159 n. 

Bacon, Francis, his contribution to phi- 
losophy, 353 ; quotation from, 383. 

Baldwin, James Mark, his Mental 
Development, quoted, 2, 58 n. 

Ball, W. W. R., his History of Mathe- 
matics, quoted, 355. 

Balliet, Thomas M., quoted, 229 n. _ 

Barbarians or rustics, their invasion 
of the cities, 454, 455 ; tendency to 
revert to condition of, 455; their 
desire for prosperity and ease of life, 
455,456; their ideals, 456, 457; their 
principles, 457-459; a menace to the 
city, 459; so characterized by their 
ideas, 459, 460 ; city millionaire and 
country farmer somewhat above, 459 ; 
the half-barbarian, 459, 460. 
Baxter, Richard, his Christian Ethics, 
quoted, 470 a 



522 



INDEX 



Beauty, a matter of the heart, 29; 
meaning of the word, 141 n. 

Beecher, Henry Ward, his Life 
Thoughts, quoted, 82, 465 n. ; quoted, 
485 ; his last words, 487 n. 

Biography, defects of, 428. 

Biology, its importance in the science 
of education, 142. 

Birdseye, Clarence Frank, his Individ- 
ual Training in our Colleges, quoted, 
423, 468 n. 

Bismarck, 71, 444 n. 

Bluntschli, John Kaspar, a sentence 
from his Theory of the State consid- 
ered phonically, 234. 

Boards of education, composed of lay- 
men, 1 19 n. ; constitution and jurisdic- 
tion of, in American public schools, 



131, 134, 



186, 187, 187 n. ; mem- 



bers of, influenced by their powers, 
133 ; election of, in Colorado and St. 
Louis, 135 n. ; one justification of their 
policy, 169; disadvantages of large 
membership in, 198, 199. 

Boards of Trustees, constitution and 
power of, 128, 128 n., 129, i29n. ; sel- 
dom controlled by educators, 128, 
129. 

Body, training of the, 5, 6, 29 ; impor- 
tance of knowledge concerning, 206; 
conditioned by the mind, 245, 246, 
248, 495 ; periodicity of, 281, 2S2. 

Book of the Dead, 70. 

Brook, his Ye Cannot Come, quoted, 
163. 

Brotherhood of man, results accom- 
plished by the idea of, 377. 

Brown, Elmer Ellsworth, his Making 
of our Middle Schools, quoted, 115, 

Brown, John, aboliticmist, jt,. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, his Religio 
Medici, quoted, 468; his Christian 
Morals, quoted, 470 n., 471 n. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 247 n. ; 
her Aurora Leigh, quoted, 203 ; her 
Cry of the Children, quoted, 304. 

Browning, Robert, his Rabbi Ben Ezra, 
quoted, 370. 

Bruno, Giordano, philosophy of, 353. 

Bryant, William Cullen, his Forest 
Hymn, quoted, 19. 

Buddha, his comprehension of the 
world-spirit, 162. 

Burke, Edmund, his theory regarding 
the State, 293, 294. 

Burns, Robert, his Is there for Honest 
Poverty? 105 n. 

Business, when it tends to domestic 
peace of society, 34 n. ; its struggle 
with the State for control of society, 
43 ; its relation to culture, 46 ; delu- 
sions regarding, 46, 47, 47 n.; a war- 
fare, 46, 47, 310 ; the theory oi, 47, 48 ; 



morality gaining upon, 48 ; good and 
evil features of, 51 ; failures in, yy ; 
the training demanded by, 135, 136; 
masters of, not result of this training, 
136; sins of, 304, 305; distinction 
between occupation and, 307, 308 ; 
characteristic purpose of, 309, 311; 
ethics of, 310; truth and promise- 
keeping would wreck, 310, 311. 

Business schools. See Commercial 
schools. 

Busy work, 431. 

Butler, Nicholas Murray, his Meaning 
of Education, quoted, 2, 386 n. 

Byron, Lord, 72, -j^- 

Caesar, Caius Julius, 71, J^ ; his failure, 

274. 

Caldwell, William, his Schopenhauer's 
System in its Philosophical Signifi- 
cance, quoted, I43 n., 349 n., 350 n. 

Calumny, attitude of educated man to- 
ward, 469. 

Canvassing agents, 309. 

Capital punishment, 50. 

Carlyle, Thomas, his essay on Labor, 
quoted, 383 ; his Sartor Resartus, 
quoted, 59 n. 

Caste, 99, 100. 

Catherine, Empress of Russia, 33, 

Cave, Plato's use of, as illustration, 3. 

Celibacy, of Roman Catholic priests, 
effect of, on scholarly class, 126, 127 ; 
women teachers compelled to, 170, 
183; a bar to successful teaching, 170. 

Census, desirabihty of adopting eco- 
nomic distinctions in, 307, 308. 

Changes, physical, before birth, 375 ; 
at adolescence, 375, 376 ; in social in- 
stitutions. 376, 376 n., 377, 380. 

Characteristics, acquired, 26 n., 32, 
32 n. ; classification of human, 87 ; 
possessed by a community, 87, 88. 

Charity, a moral law of culture, 300. ' 

Charlemagne, 249. 

Chicago School of Education, 253. 

Children, Society's endeavor to pro- 
tect, 9; natural aspirations of, 122, 
123 ; qualities of, persisting in men of 
genius, 123 ; should own property, 
251 ; their desire for productive activ- 
ity, 252, 253 ; the church and, 256, 
257; their training for efficiency in 
government, 259, 260 ; for economic 
efficiency, 269, 270 ; for military serv- 
ice, 270, 271; their relation to the 
family, 289; training of powers of ob- 
servation in, 386, 387 ; regimentation 
not to be required of, 3S6, 387, 388 ; 
moral training of, in the school, 389- 
393 ; arithmetic not a proper study for, 
405, 406 ; history as such not suited 
to, 407, 408, 429, 432 ; sciences 



INDEX 



523 



as such not suited to, 409, 410 ; minds 
of, compared with the adult, 409, 
410; materials of science belong to, 
410; country-life the right of, 410, 
411 ; inappropriateness of the higher 
arts in formal education of, 412 ; 
lesser arts suited to, 414, 415 ; lack 
of coordination in, 414, 415 ; physical 
education of, 416-419, 422 ; primary 
motives manifested in, 446. 
Christ, the variety of his experiences, 
162; his comprehension of the world- 
spirit, 162 ; sinless, but not complete, 

274- 
Church, the, auns of, primarily per- 
sonal, 35 ; not synonymous with reli- 
gion, 35 n. ; self-abnegation inculcated 
by, 39, 40; origin of, 39 ; disintegration 
of, 43 ; subordination of the American 
State to, 45, 45 n.; dependence of the 
School upon, 126-128 ; expansion of 
rehgion through disintegration of, 
255 ; children and, 256, 257 ; deprived 
of its economic functions, 256, 258 ; 
its relation to religion, 290-293; ne- 
cessary to the preservation of religion, 
292 ; its duty to the individual, 292, 

293- 
Citizens, or natives of the city, 454, 

Citizenship, preparation for, not the 
paramount aim of the School, 44, 103 ; 
training for, in a democracy, 259, 260 ; 
girls given no preparation for, 261 ; 
moral laws of, 295. 

City, three proper functions of, 410; 
health incompatible with life in, 421; 
reaction against, 421, 422 ; its ar- 
tificial nature, 449, 450 ; character of 
the ideal, 450, 451, 462 ; impossibility 
of homes in, 451 ; movement from the 
country toward, 454, 455 ; in danger 
from the barbarian, 459. 

Civilization, immaterial requirements of 
an enduring, 10 ; necessity for a leisure 
class in, 11-13, 36, 93; dependent 
upon education, 52, 89, 90 ; its me- 
chanical processes, 53 ; definitions of, 
54 ; cyclical character of, 54 n. ; its 
quality depends upon its morality, 54, 
55, 59, 90; good and bad, 68,69; 
three perils of, 227, 228 ; health and, 
359-364 ; forces arrayed against, 460; 
the warfare of, 461 ; its progress by 
conflict, 462 ; analogy between growth 
of forests and, 476, 477 ; progress 
away from nature, the true, 479, 480 ; 
abominations of modern, 4S0 ; cure of, 
481, 482 ; specific conditions attend- 
ant upon true, 483 ; failure of educa- 
tion to maintain earlier forms of, 492, 
493, 495. 
Classes, infertility of the, 91, 92 ; kept 



up by variants from the masses, 91 ; 
maintenance of, essential, 92. 
Cleanliness, the duty of personal, 279. 
Cleopatra, Tt^. 

Clergy, restrictions placed upon, by Ro- 
man Catholic Church, 33. See also 
Priests. 
Clifford, William Kingdon, his Ethics 
of Religion, quoted, 8 n.; his Decline 
of Religious Balief, quoted, 8 n.; his 
Essays, quoted, 23 n. 
Coit, his Christian Ethics, quoted, 6 n. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, his Aids to 

Reflection, quoted, 37. 
College, purpose of, 116. See also Uni- 
versity. 
Colorado, election of boards of educa- 
tion in, 135 n. 
Columbus, Christopher, 73. 
Commerce, schools of. See Commercial 

schools. 
Commercial schools, 135, 136. 
Communities, responsibilities of, 373, 
374 ; the individual moulded by, 374. 
Compulsory education, 15, 135, 135 n., 

183, 184. 
Conscience, nature of, 8, 8 n., 57. 
Consciousness, evolution of, 156, 156 n.; 
the first evidence of psychical pro- 
gress, 158, 159. 
Consciousness of kind, a fundamental 

principle of sociology, 272, 374. 
Constants, in education, 424-428. 
Constitutional conventions, 181, 181 n. 
Copernicus, ^i- 

Corporations, democratic, future possi- 
bilities of, 48. 
Cost, threefold, of education, 106-108. 
Cost of living, increase in, 439, 440. 
Country, Ufe in, the right of childhood, 
410, 411 ; educative influences now 
reaching, 451, 452 ; seat of agriculture 
and forestry, 462. See also Villages. 
Courage, a test of culture, 299; the 

basic virtue, 299 n. 
Covetousness, 159, 159 "• 
Crime, its relation to sin, 150; com- 
mitters of, 152, 153. 
Criminals, sane and insane, 50 n.; duty 
of education toward, 94 ; civilization 
and, 483. 
Criminology, has much in common with 
pedagogy, son.; its importance to the 
science of education, 149, 152; the 
three functions of, 151, 152. 
Critics, 264, 264 n., 265 n, 
Croesus, 73. 

Cromwell, 71 ; his failure, 275. _ 
Culture, its modes of expression, 45 ; 
self-development the motive of, 46: 
its relation to education, 46, 88, 89, 
342 ; to Property and Business, 46 ; 
relation of individual to racial, 65 ; 



524 



INDEX 



failure of most persons in, ']'] ; its 
imperfect control of the university, 
128, 129 ; may be distinguished from 
pseudo-culture, 145 n. ; dependence of 
civilization upon, 227 ; moral laws of, 
298-302 ; seven ideals of, 367. 

Curiosity, 445. 

Curriculum, arrangement of, by subjects 
or grades, 430. 

Cycles, the method of progress, 155. 

Dante, 41 n., 71, 160; a failure to his 
contemporaries, 74, 75 ; his Inferno, 
quoted, 442 ; his representation of 
falsifiers and traitors, 460 n. 

Dartmouth College case, 130 n. 

Darwin, Charles Robert, 142 n., 354 ; 
his Origin of Species, quoted, 180. 

Davidson, Thomas, his History of Edu- 
cation, quoted, 13S, 196 n. 

Death, in the eyes of old age, 369, 370 ; 
attitude of the educated man toward, 
473, 474 ; common attitude toward, 
486, 487 ; quotation from Plato re- 
garding, 4S6 n. 

Defeat, education by, 454. 

Defective classes, duty of education to- 
ward, 94. 

Definition, importance of, 239, 240, 241. 

Delboeuf, quotation from, 494. 

Democracy, education and, 2, 140, 186, 
187, 488, 493 ; the constitutional con- 
vention the fundamental legislature 
of, 181. 

Demosthenes, 124. 

Depravity, an evidence of incomplete 
education, 175, 176. 

Descartes, Rene, 353, 355. 

Development, physical, the limit 
reached, 61, 63; likeness of educa- 
tional to the typical human, 156; 
psychical, of the individual, 156-160. 

De Vries, Hugo. See Vries, Hugo de. 

Dewey, John, 253. 

Dickens, Charles, his Uncommercial 
Traveller, quoted, 497. 

Disease, humanity's indebtedness to, 
149. 

Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beacons- 
field, his Manchester Speech (1866), 
quoted, 31. 

District of Columbia, disfranchised 
citizens of, 259 n. 

Divorce, 76. 

Domestic science and art, schools for 
training in, 125. 

Dowry, ^Z n. 

Drama, ignored by the School, 272, 

273- 
Drawing, a constant in education, 426. 
Dryden, John, his Oliver Cromwell, 

quoted, 105 n. 
Duality of man, education and, 5, 22 n. 



Educability, 

climactic years of, 14, 



of animals, 4 ; 
unaffected 



by physical conditions, race, sex, or 
time, 62, 63 ; of adult men, 67. 
Education, democracy and, 2, 140, 186, 
187, 48S, 493 ; conscious creatures 
capable of, 4 ; nature of, in the genius, 
5 ; perfection of, impossible, 5 ; pur- 
poses of, in respect to the duality of 
man, 5, 6, 22 n. ; progress of the in- 
dividual, the aim of, 7 ; must provide 
for the work of the world, 10; when it 
should begin and end, 13-16; both 
society and solitude necessary factors 
in, 17-20 ; terms used in, often re- 
flect methods, 20, 21 ; must seek truth, 
23, 24, 121, 122,124, 226 ; recapitu- 
lation theory in, 24-28 ; orderliness 
the proper manner of, 29, 29 n. ; its 
relation to culture, 46, 88, 89, 342 ; 
to teaching, 52 ; essential problem of, 
60 ; the theory that it is never con- 
sciously achieved, 60 ; character the 
final test of, 61 ; results of, in the 
race, 63, 64, 65; inevitable, 65, 66; 
voluntary, 66 ; familiar evidences of, 
67 ; good and bad, 67-69 ; must de- 
velop a successful life, 70 ; must dis- 
criminate between success and failure, 
81 ; its readiness to propagate new 
ideas, 88 ; its purpose toward the in- 
dividual and the community, 89; must 
help to maintain the classes, 92 ; its 
task with the masses, 93 ; its obliga- 
tion toward genius, 94 ; toward the 
defective and criminal classes, 94 ; its 
duty in evaluation, 94, 95 ; social 
motives in, 97, 98 ; education toward 
ends unwarranted, 99-104 ; dis- 
belief in the reality of, 104; in the 
possibility of, 85, 105 ; objection to 
cost of, 106-108 ; personal causes 
for failure of, 108-110; system of, 
in the Roman Catholic Church, 126, 
127, 129; social forces necessary to 
produce a formal system of, 137 ; 
changes in the mechanism of, 138, 
139, 140; an art or a science? 141, 
142 ; bases of the science of, 142-155 ; 
purposes of, 163; materials and exer- 
cises employed by the formal system 
of, 164-167; some probable fea- 
tures of, if conducted by educators, 
175-179; the problem of habit in, 
231 ; the arts in, 265, 412-416; effi- 
ciency in, 265, 266 ; ideals of, 367, 
384, 392, 393, 483, 484 ; method of, 
depends on purpose of, 394-396 ; 
true method of, psychological, 396 ; 
pseudo-methods in, 396, 397 ; place 
of literature and language in, 397- 
404, 425 ; of mathematics, 404, 427, 
427 n. ; of history, 407-409 ; of 



INDEX 



525 



science, 409-412, 425; of health, 416- 
419, 422; of play, 424; of nature- 
study, 425 ; of music and drawing, 
426 ; electives in, 428, 429 ; motive 
of, 479; as the cure of civilization, 
482, 492, 493 ; its failure to main- 
tain earlier civilizations, 492, 493, 495. 
See also Compulsory education ; 
School. 

Educationist, use of the term, 118. 

Educators, use of the term, 118; boards 
of trustees seldom controlled by, 128, 
129; seldom on boards of education, 
132 ; results of large powers delegated 
to, 133 ; the School should be con- 
trolled Ijy, 298 ; moral law for, 298 ; 
their duty to Society, 433 ; adequate 
salaries for, 440, 441 ; analogy be- 
tween leaders and, 453 n. See also 
Teachers. 

Efficiency, relation between morality, 
literacy and, 217, 218, 221, 223, 226, 
227, 230, 231, 264 ; as an ideal in edu- 
cation, 219 ; economic nature of, 220, 
221 ; method of attaining, 221, 222 ; 
mental attitude toward, 243 ; condi- 
tioned by intelligence, 243-245 ; 
relation of health to, 245-247 ; rela- 
tion of art to, 265, 392, 424 ; in ed- 
ucation itself, 265, 266 ; development 
of economic, in the United States, 
267 ; early appearance of economic, 
268, 269 ; the School unable to prepare 
for economic, 269, 270 ; attainment of, 
through play, 388, 389, 392 ; physical 
culture the seed-ground of, 424, 

Egoism, altruism and, 479, 480. 

Egypt, nature of the temple and priest 
in ancient, 116, 117. 

Election to office, illusion concerning, 

93, 94- 

Elective studies, 428, 429. 

Eliot, Charles William, his More 
Money for the Public Schools, 
quoted, 44 n., 97, 203. 

Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 33, 71 ; 
her Romola, quoted, 469 n., 471 n.; 
her Daniel Deronda, quoted, 468 n. 

Elizabeth, Queen of England, 33. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62 ; his Society 
and Solitude, quoted, 18, 19 ; his 
Concord Ode, quoted, 24 ; his Nature, 
quoted, 2i7 ', his Character, quoted, 
60 n. ; his Terminus, quoted, 369 ; his 
Boston Hymn, quoted, 105 n. 

Emotion, a mode of mind, 495. 

Energetics, 249 n. 

Energy, physical, and psychical vitality, 
444 ; excess of, 445, 447, 447 n. 

England, morality of, 278. 

Environment, as a bar to education, no. 

Esperanto, 23^ n. 

Ethics, their relation to morals, 58, 59. 



Euripides, 72 ; his Phrixas, quoted, 97. 
Evaluation, of studies and exercises, 

383-385, 386, 393- 
Evans, Marian. See Eliot, George. 
Evil, attitude of the educated man 

toward, 472 ; necessity for, 489 ; law 

of suggestion applied to, 489 n. 
Evolution, definition of, 42 n. See also 

Development. 
Exercise, current notions regarding, 246. 

Failure, in accumulating property, 75 ; 
in religion, 75, 76; in domestic life, 
76, "jy ; in education and culture, jy ; 
in government, yj ; in business, yj\ 
tests of, 79. 

Family, the, characteristic motive of, 
2,^ ; secondary purpose of, 39 ; disin- 
tegration of, 43 ; subordination of the 
State to, 45, 45 n. ; dependence of the 
School upon, 125, 126; moral laws of, 
288-290 ; decline of family affection, 
290 ; persistence of, in the future, 463. 

Fathers, rights of, 435, 436. 

Feelings, manifestations of the, 146. 

Fenelon, 11 on. 

Fighting, 447, 448. See also War. 

Finance, principles of morality should 
precede knowledge of, 432. 

Finch, quotation from, 435. 

Fiske, John, adaptation from his 
Through Nature to God, 373. 

Food, 205, 205 n. ; evils due to lack of 
suf^cient, 280, 280 n. ; adulteration of, 

305- 

Forests, analogy between civilization 
and, 476, 477. 

Fornication, 305. 

France, morality of, 378. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 72, 437 ; his say- 
ing in regard to war and peace, 49 n. 

Free will, an evidence of, 160 n. 

Freedom, the goal of man, 23, 24 ; aca- 
demic, 43 ; in endowed, and in State 
universities, 43 n. ; influence of, upon 
economic activity, 46, 46 n. 

French Revolution, a cause of, 10. 

Fromentin, Eugene, his old Masters of 
Belgium and Holland, quoted, 334. 

Froude, James Anthony, his Short 
Studies, quoted, 412. 

Galileo, 58, 72. 

Games, the seed-ground of morality, 424. 

Genealogies, paternal, 261. 

Genius, descendants of, 91, gin.; the 
duty of education to, 94; childlike 
qualities persisting in, 123; attitude 
of the logical mind toward, 410. 

Geography, text-books of, 167. 

Gibbon, Edward, title and thesis of his 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire, 54 n. 



526 



INDEX 



Gilder, Richard Watson, quotation 
from, 350. 

Oilman, Charlotte Perkins, her Human 
Work, quoted, 57n. 

Girls, private schools for, 125 ; church 
schools for, 128 n. 

Gladstone, William Ewart, 71. 

God, nature of, 213, 214. 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 72 ; 
quoted, 324 n. ; his Schiller, quoted, 8 ; 
his Torquato Tasso, quoted, 201; 
his Sayings in Prose, quoted, 235 n., 
425, 466 n. ; the essential meaning of 
his Faust, 458 n. ; his Faust, quoted, 
464. 

Golden Rule, the, 57 n. 

Good, as antithetical to harm, 79 ; that 
which promotes life is, 325. 

Goodness, a matter of the will, 28. See 
also Holiness; Morality. 

Gore, Rt. Rev. Charles, Bishop of Bir- 
mingham, definition of the educated 
man in his Birmingham Address, 
103 n. 

Gdrky, Mdxim (pseud, of Alexis Mak- 
simovitch Pieshkov), 449 n. 

Government, not synonymous with 
State, 35 n. ; popular ignorance of, "j"] ; 
doctrine of monarchy, aristocracy 
and democracy regarding three de- 
partments of, 144 n.; training for 
efficiency in, 259-263; by teachers or 
by pupils, 263, 264. 

Grammar, function of, 237, 239 ; im- 
portance of, 241 ; motive for study of, 
401 ; stage at which this study should 
come, 4C1, 402. 

Great men, possibilities of human na- 
ture revealed by, 8; the failures of, 
274, 275. 

Gregory, St., quotation from his Homi- 
lies, 359. 

Guizot, 54. 

Habits, the problem of, in education, 
231; psychology of, 231 n., 232 n. ; 
instincts and, 358 ; of individuals, 
374 ; of communities, 374 ; of social in- 
stitutions, 376, Tj-]'] ; form most of life, 
378 ; of the school, 379, 380. 

Hall, Granville Stanley, his Adolescence, 
quoted, 9n., 164. 

Hand, development of the, 61. 

Handwriting, legible, a moral duty, 

392. 
Hans, the educated German horse, 

209 n. 
Hanus, Paul H., his Modern School, 

quoted, 97. 
Harmony of all the powers, the object of 

education, 29, 29 n. 
Harper, William R., his Trend in 

Higher Education, quoted, m. 



Harris, William T., quotation from, 
486. 

Hartmann, Eduard von, 57, 208 n. 

Health, its relation to success, 78 ; some 
disadvantages of perfect, 149; its re- 
lation to efficiency, 245-247 ; prosper- 
ity a condition of, 246, 246 n. ; supera- 
bundant, 249 ; civilization and, 359- 
364 ; nature's efforts to restore, 360 ; 
sin and, 361 ; labor and, 362 ; poverty 
and, 363 ; evidences of, 364 ; partly a 
matter of will, 365 ; of work, 365 ; re- 
lation between holiness and, 366-368, 
420, 422 ; highest ideal of education, 
384 ; its place in education, 412-416 ; 
an end in itself, 416, 418 ; means of se- 
curing, 418 ; motive for seeking, 419; 
art of, 420 ; city life antagonistic to, 
421. 

Heredity, 24 n., 26 n. ; modifications of, 
32 ; weight of opinion regarding, 32; 
cross-functioning in, 66 ; a bar to ed- 
ucation, 108, no. See also Charac- 
teristics, acquired ; Recapitulation 
theory. 

History, as edited for school use, 167, 
427, 428, 432 ; definitions of, 406, 407 ; 
as such, not the concern of children, 
407, 408, 427 ; as literature, 408 ; mo- 
tive for the study of, 409 ; superfi- 
ciality of the sciences depending upon, 
428. 

Hobhouse, Leonard T., his Morals in 
Evolution, quoted, 442. 

Holiness, relation between health and, 
366-368, 420, 422 ; old age and, 368 ; 
man's dream of, 393. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, his Chambered 
Nautilus, quoted, 30. 

Home, the, failure of, 76 ; result to 
children from loss of industrial ac- 
tivities in, 253; restoration of, 255; 
the true place for, 451, 462; the func- 
tion of, 462. 

Homer, his Iliad, quoted, 465 n. 

Homestead land, 332 n. 

Hopkins, Mark, 19; quotation from, 
402. 

Home, Herman H., his Philosophy of 
Education, quoted, 475. 

Horse, our treatment of the, 456 n. 

Hours of labor, 305. 

HoweUs, Wilham Dean, on the artist, 

33° "• 
Hughes, R. E., his Making of Citizens, 

quoted, 164, 196 n., 424 n. 
Hugo, Victor, 72. 
Human nature, no complete science of, 

180. 
Humanities, subjects belonging to the, 

164. 
Hume, David, his Enquiry concerning 

Human Understanding, quoted, 203 n. 



INDEX 



527 



Hunger, 444. 

Huxley, Thomas Henry, his On Evo- 
lution, quoted, 138 ; his Lay Sermons, 
quoted, 465 n. 

Ideals, the seven, of education and cul- 
ture, 367. 

Ideas, assimilation of, 86 ; three senses 
in which the word idea may be used, 
87 n.; attitude of society, education, 
and culture toward new, 88, 89 ; 
power of, 377 ; separation of men by 
differences in, 378, 379 ; teaching of 
Plato regarding, 491, 494. 

Idiom Neutral, 233 n. 

Ignorance, its menace to civilization, 
227; method of procedure to wisdom 
from, 484. 

Immigrants, attempts to Americanize, 

44. 
Immortality, 7, 7 n. 
Impulse, motive expresses itself in, 

444. 
Individual, the, more important than 

Society or social institutions, 7, 38 n.; 

his claims against Society, 283, 284, 

289, 494. 
Individuality, its relation to personality, 

346. 
Individualization, causes of American, 

266. 
Industrial revolution, 304, 305. 
Infancy, prolonging of, 9. 
Ingersoll, Robert G., his Crime against 

Criminals, quoted, 70. 
Insane, educability of the, 4. 
Instincts, and habits, 358. 
Institutions, source of new, 84. See also 

Social institutions. 
Instruction. See Teachers. 
Instructor, use of the term, 118. 
Intellect, manifestations of, 146 ; a 

mode of mind, 495. 
Intelligence, sense-knowledge the basis 

of, 205, 206 ; attainment of, through 

observation, 206, 207, 208, 386-388, 

392 ; science the harvest of, 392, 424 ; 

play the seed-ground of, 424. 
Intention, not to be confused with pur- 
pose, 444 n. 
Intolerance, when a political necessity, 

42. _ 
Intuitions, 122. 
Italy, morality of, 278. 

James, William, his Talks on Psycho- 
logy and Life's Ideals, quoted, 61. 

Jefferies, Richard, his Pageant of Sum- 
mer, quoted, 486. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, quotation from, 
469 n., 471 n. 

Judd, Charles H., his Genetic Psycho- 
logy for Teachers, quoted, 466 n. 



Kant, Immanuel, 57, 62,71, 144 n., 355 ; 
quotations from, 59 n., 203 n., 396 ; fol- 
lowers of, 346. 

Keats, John, 72. 

Kempis, Thomas Jl, quotation from his 
Imitation of Christ, 473 n. 

Kindergarten, dangers of the, 13 ; func- 
tion of, 387, 392 ; spirit of, should be 
continued, 3S8. 

Kipling, Rudyard, on the artist, 330. 

Knowledge, growth of the race in, 63, 
64; much has perished, 63, 64 ; results 
of diffusion of, 140; three kinds of 
use for new, 145, 146 ; unorganized, 
356; functionings of, 357, 358. 

Labor, results of unjust distribution of 
products of, 152 n. ; not the source of 
wealth, 155; organization of, 306 ; con- 
notations of, 365. 

Land, private ownership in, 284-287; 
right of the individual family to, 
377 n. 

Language, intellectual progress depend- 
ent upon, 208; deficiencies of, 210; 
impedes thought, 212, 213; condenses 
thought, 213, 214; mastery of, a con- 
dition of genius, 214; Tailure to un- 
derstand, 215, 216 ; desirability of a 
universal, 233, 233 n. ; four great 
questions of, 233-240 ; advantages of 
acquiring a foreign, 235, 235 n., 236, 
237, 241, 403, 404 ; advantages of 
written over spoken, 238 ; literature 
and, the most important tools in edu- 
cation, 397-404; motive for the study 
of, 398 ; as a medium for poetry and 
philosophy, 402, 403 ; point at which it 
fails, 403; a constant in education, 425. 

Lankester, Edwin Ray, his Kingdom of '' 
Man, quoted, 464, 479 n. 

Law, theory and administration of the, 
27. 

Laymen, in control of culture, 128 ; au- 
thority of, in educational matters, 
pernicious, 199, 200 ; control of, a 
factor in the undue conservatism of 
the School, 381; should not control 
in School or State, 497. 

Leaders, analogy between educators 
and, 453 n. 

Lee, Robert Edward, 73. 

Legislation, school, importance of, 1S2 ; 
incompetent or malicious, 183 : that 
proposed for private (parochial) 
schools, 184 ; embarrassment of elab- 
orate, 198. 

Legislators, qualification tests for, 15:; ; 
incompetency of, in school matters, 
183. 

Legislatures, intention of, in a demo- 
cracy, 179 ; the constitutional conven- 
tion the first form of, iSi. 



528 



INDEX 



Leighton, Rt. Rev. Robert, Archbishop 
of Glasgow, quotation from, 475. 

Leisure, schools for education dedicated 
to, 115; necessary to growth of the 
mind, 115. 

Leisure class, function of, 11-13, 36; 
who should constitute, 304. 

Life, an end in itself, 174, 488 ; large- 
ness of, 109 ; meaning of, 491. 

Life insurance investigations, New 
York, 245. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 15, 71; his Sanga- 
mon Address, quoted, 82 ; his fail- 
. ure to comprehend the world-spirit, 
161 ; his course in regard to slavery, 
224. 

Literacy, elements in, 209-218, 232, 
233; relation between efificiency, mo- 
rality and, 217, 220, 223, 226, 227, 
230, 231 ; uselessness of, and remedy 
for, mere literacy, 221, 222, 228, 229 ; 
action sometimes wholly unaffected 
by, 230 ; process of acquiring, 240, 
241 ; its relation to observation, 242 ; 
its relation to science, 317. 

Literature, as edited for school use, 
167 ; language and, the most im- 
portant tools in education, 397-404 ; 
motive for the study of, 398 ; reason 
for neglect of Oriental, 404. 

Locke, John, 19. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, his 
To Agassiz, quoted, 326 ; his sonnet 
on Giotto's Tower, quoted, 337, 338 ; 
quotation from, 472 n. 

Lotze, Rudolph Hermann, his Microcos- 
mus, quoted, 113, 115, 486, 494. 

Louisiana, state centralization of edu- 
cation in, 190, 

Lowell, James Russell, his Columbus, 
quoted, 20, 468 n., 475 ; his A Parable, 
quoted, 57n., 303; his Present Crisis, 
quoted, 84 ; his Glance behind the 
Curtain, quoted, 121 ; his disregard of 
phonics, 399, 400. 

Luther, Martin, 71; quotation from, 472. 

Macaulay, T. B., quotation from, 428. 

Mackenzie, Rev. Alexander, 160 n. 

Maecenas, 73. 

Man, the anti-civilized, sins of, 460, 
460 n., 461. 

Man, civilized. See Civilization. 

Man, the natural, primary motives of, 
443-447, 455; secondary motives of, 
445, 447; genetic progress of, 448 ; our 
trust in the morals of, 448 ; the future 
of humanity determined by, 449 ; the 
builder of cities, 449, 450 ; his resist- 
ance to culture, 452 ; follows the line 
of least resistance, 453. 

Man, the well-educated, his qualities, 
465-474. 



Mann, Horace, quoted, 423 ; his Educa- 
tion, quoted, 52. 

Marcus Aurelms, quoted, 486. 

Marriage, best time for, 16 ; civil, in- 
vented by the Family, 45 n. ; self- 
alienation enforced by, 1 70 ; forbid- 
den to women teachers, 170, 183 ; 
often a bar to men teachers, 170, 171, 
172. 

Martineau, James, his Ethics and Re- 
ligion, quoted, 59 n. ; his Essays, 
quoted, 163 ; his Spiritual Growth, 
quoted, 433. 

Masses, variants from the, 91, 92,93; 
the task of education among, 93 ; lim- 
itations of, 93. 

Mathematics, constitute pure science, 
318; place of, in education, 404 ; study 
of, does not belong to childhood, 405, 
406 ; motive for the study of, 406 ; as 
a constant in education, 427, 427 n. 

Maxwell, William H., his Report to the 
Board of Education, N. Y., T906, 
109 n.; his article on Education for 
Efficiency, quoted, 115. 

Mazzini, Joseph, quotation from, 473 n. 

Mechanics, seldom become criminals, 
152, 153, 154- 

Mechanism, mission of, 113, 358. 

Mediocrity, tendency to revert to, 92 ; 
educability of, 212. 

Melancholy, induced by civilization, 
347- 

Mental phenomena, classifications of, 
67 n. 

Mestizos, educational attempts among, 
120, 121 ; cases of superabundant 
health among, 249 n.; intellectual ex- 
tremes among, 427. 

Method, educational, depends upon the 
purpose of education, 394-396 ; psy- 
chological, the true, 396 ; definition of, 
396; pseudo- methods, 396, 397. 

Michael Angelo, 72, 329. 

Middle classes, qualities of, in America, 
120. 

Military service, no general preparation 
for, in American schools, 270, 271. 

Mill, John Stuart, 54 ; quotation from 
his System of Logic regarding rela- 
tions of art and science, 412. 

Millais, Sir John, 107. 

Milton, John, quoted, 138, 423, 468, 

473 n- 
Mind, conditions the body, 245, 246, 248, 
495; regular exercise of, 248 n.; biolo- 
gical origin of, 346 n. ; three modes of, 

495- 

Mitchell, Arthur, his Past in the Pre- 
sent, quoted, 54. 

Monarchy, education in, for efificiency in 
government, 259, 260. 

Money, of restricted usefulness, 46, 47 ; 



INDEX 



529 



what one has a right to do for, 306 ; 
decrease in purchasing power of, 439, 
440. 

Monogamy, ideals developed by, 2SS. 

Morality, largely a matter of the in- 
tellect, 27, 28 ; its gains over war 
and business, 48 ; social, 55 ; popular, 
55 ; historical, 55 ; national, 56 ; com- 
parative, 56, 57 ; ideal, 57, 58, 59 ; its 
relation to ethics, 58, 59 ; that of the 
community changes with that of the 
individual, 88 ; the essence of civiliza- 
tion, 90; of rulers and ruled, 119, 120; 
relation between literacy, efficiency, 
and, 217, 218, 223, 226,227, 230,231; 
a neglected mode of education, 219; 
standards of, 224-226 ; decline of, a 
menace to civilization, 228 , social 
machinery and qualities to promote, 
276, 277 ; some evidences of, 278, 279 ; 
physical laws of, 279-282 ; laws of, as 
applied to property, 283-288 ; to the 
family, 288-290 ; to the church, 290- 
293 ; to the state, 294, 295 ; to the 
school, 296-298 ; to culture, 298-302 ; 
to occupation, 302-306 ; to the pro- 
fessions, 307; to society, 312; differ- 
ence between that of the family and 
that of the school, 389-393; part of 
the will in, 390, 391 ; philosophy the 
harvest of, 392, 424 ; games the seed- 
ground of, 424. 

Morgan, Conway Lloyd, his Habit and 
Instinct, quoted, 373. 

Mothers, proposition to pay salaries to, 
47, 47 n. ; seldom become criminals, 
152, 153, 154; support of children by, 
171, 172; responsibilities of teachers 
to, 434f 435- 

Motives, ideals, values, and, 143-145 ; 
primary, 443-447 ; secondary, 445, 
447 ; training of, 445, 446. 

Miinsterberg, Hugo, 250 n.; his The 
Americans, quoted, 31. 

Museums, should furnish material for 
all science studies to city children, 41 1, 
411 n. 

Music, importance of, in education, 265 ; 
a constant in education, 426. 

Mystery, power of, 40. 

Napoleon I, 71, 161 ; his failure, 
274. 

National Educational Association, Pro- 
ceedings (1905), quoted, 115. 

Nature, acquaintance with, the purpose 
of instruction, 7 ; lessons of, 19, 20; 
the search of science for truth in, 320, 
321 ; results of this study on human 
economy, 323 ; on the student, 323, 
324 ; more than science, 326 ; love of, 
a late development, 327 ; civilization 
is progress away from, 479, 480. 



Nature-study, value of, 386, 387 ; an 
absolute constant in education, 425. 

Negroes, education of, 120, 120 n., 121, 
426 ; cases of superabundant health 
among, 249 n. ; possibilities of, 427 n. 

Neighbor-religion, 57, 208 n. 

New Commandments, 57 n. 

New Jersey, differentiation of the School 
from the State in, 181, 182, 

Newspapers, public opinion manufac- 
tured by, through fictions, 160 n. 

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 119 n., 149 n.; 
neighbor-religion ridiculed by, 57, 
208 n. ; his theory regarding the 
moral qualities of rulers and servants, 
119 n. 

Nutrition, varying degrees of, in soul 
and body, 91 n. 

Observation, to acquire power of correct, 
206, 207 ; its relation to literacy, 242 ; 
its relation to science, 318 ; the path- 
way to intelligence, 386, 387 ; training 
the power of, in children, 386, 387. 

Occupations, variety of, practiced in this 
country, 267, 268 ; moral laws of, 302- 
306 ; distinction between arts and, 
302 ; between business and, 307, 30S. 

Office-holders, illusions concerning, 93, 
94. 

Oklahoma, Constitution of, 134 n. 

Old age, holiness and, 368 ; blessedness 
of, 369 ; life in the eyes of, 370. 

Order, the badge of senility, 410. 

Orderliness, the manner of education, 
29, 29 n. 

Orient, its attitude toward efficiency, 

243- 

Oriental literatures, reasons for neglect 
of, 404. 

O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, his lines on the 
power of the poet, 10, ri, 

O'Shea, M. V., his Education as Adjust- 
ment, quoted, 383. 

Ovid, quotation from his Metamorpho- 
ses, 359. 

Pain, progress due to, 149, 149 n. 
Painting, importance of, in education, 

265. 
Parasitism, economic, 223. 
Parentage, self-alienation enforced by, 

170; should be a condition of all 

teachers, 170, 171, 172. 
Passions, tyranny of, no n. 
Pathology, its importance to the science 

of education, 147, 148, 149. 
Patriotism, psendo and real, 51. 
Patten, Simon Nelson, his New Basis of 

Civilization, quoted, 442. 
Pedagogue, a useless term, 118. 
Pedagogy, has much in common with 

criminology, 50 n. ; four questions in. 



530 



INDEX 



regarding studies and exercises, 423. 
See also Teachers. 

Pennsylvania, local autonomy in regard 
to education in, 190. 

Pericles, 72. 

Periodicity, of the body, 281, 282. 

Personality, the School must insure 
development of, 208 ; its relation to 
individuality, 346. 

Phillips, Wendell, quotation from, 
471 n. 

Philosophers, Plato's conclusion regard- 
ing, 95- 

Philosophy, vulgar, 33, 34, 34 n.; its 
dependence upon biology, 142, 142 n. ; 
its relation to science, 318 ; its rela- 
tion to moraUty, 341 ; likened to old 
age, 342, 343 ; purpose of a system of, 
343 ; contributions of ignorant men to, 
343. 344; definitions of, 344, 345; the 
essence of, 345, 346 ; reflects the color 
of the individual soul, 346, 347 ; adds 
neither knowledge nor skill to man, 
347, 348 ; its adjustment to new truth, 
348 ; relation of individual, to histor- 
ical, 348, 349, 351 ; dangers of, to the 
inexperienced, 350 ; development of 
historical, 351-354; its differentiation 
from science and psychology, 352 ; 

! the great questions of, 354, 355 ; func- 
tion of, in education and culture, 356; 
a mental quality or method, 385, 386 ; 
the harvest of morality, 392, 424 ; its 
demands upon language, 402, 403; 

1^ motive for studying, 420 ; its relation 
to religion, 420. 

Phonetic signs and sounds, 210, 211. 

Phonics, one of the great questions of 
language, 233-235 ; its place in liter- 
acy, 241 ; importance of, 398-400. 

Physical culture, its place in education, 
416-419, 422 ; the seed-ground of effi- 
ciency, 424. See also Exercise ; Play. 

Physiology, its importance to the sci- 
ence of education, 147; the new, 
206. 

Plato, I44n., 352, 353; his illustration 
of the Cave, 3, 4; his distinction 
between art and skill in the Gorgias, 
I36n.; his failure to comprehend the 
world-spirit, 161; interpreter of So- 
crates, 346 ; quotation from, regarding 
fear of death, 486 n.; his teaching re 
garding ideas, 491, 494. 

Play, attainment of efficiency through, 
388, 389 ; an absolute constant in 
education, 424, 424 n. ; physiological 
necessity for, 447, 447 n. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 72. 

Poet, the necessity for, in a great civiliza- 
tion, 10. 

Poetry, its demands upon language, 403. 

Political economy, its importance to the 



science of education, 154 ; the true, 
154 ; the current, 154. 

Politics, knowledge of science of gov- 
ernment should precede art of, 432. 

Pollock, Sir Frederick, his Science of 
Politics, quoted, 31, 52. 

Polyglottism, value of, 235-237, 403, 
404. 

Pope, Alexander, 444 n. 

Population, fundamental laws of, 90- 
92 ; civilization and, 483. 

Poverty, destruction of causes of, 38 ; 
ambition intensified by, 98 ; a bar to 
education, 108 ; a barrier but not a bar 
to opportunity, 212; a factor in the 
undue conservatism of the School, 
381. 

Power, progress of the spirit delayed by, 
106 ; the source of wealth, 155. 

Practical experience, meaning and value 
of, 168, 169. 

Pragmatic philosophy, 58 n. 

Precocity, two kinds of, 410; treatment 
of, in education, 431. 

Presidents, college, as presidents of 
boards of trustees, 128 n. 

Priests, the precursors of the Church, 39; 
revelation proclaimed by, 40 ; nature 
of, in ancient Egypt, 116, 117 ; effect 
of celibacy of, on scholarly class, 126, 
127. See also Clergy. 

Professions, moral law of the, 307. 

Professor, use of the term, 118. 

Progress, nature of, 138, 139. 

Property, and wealth, not synonymous, 
35. 35 n.; significance of, 36, 1,7, 40; 
strength of the instinct for, 39; threats 
of the State to overthrow, 43 n. ; sub- 
ordination of the State to, 45, 45 n. ; 
its relation to culture, 46 ; failure of 
most people to accumulate, 75 ; a 
great servitude, 106; dependence of 
the School upon, 125; theory regard- 
ing holding of, by minors, 250; chil- 
dren should hold, 251 ; prescriptions 
of the moral law regarding, 283-288 ; 
persistence of, in the future, 463. 

Property-sense, development of, 156, 

157, 159- 

Prosperity, a condition of health, 246, 
246 n. ; vital statistics and, 478, 478 n. 

Prostitution. See Social Evil. 

Protestantism, children neglected by, 
256, 257. 

Psychology, its importance to the 
science of education, 142, 147 ; phy- 
siological, 147, 147 n. ; genetic and 
biogenetic, 147, 148. 

Punctuation, 237, 238. 

Pupil-government, 263, 264. 

Race, educability unaffected by, 62. 
Raphael, 72. 



INDEX 



531 



Reading, purpose of, 387, 388. See also 
Literature. 

Recapitulaiion theory, 24, 25, 26, 27; 
social aspect of, 28. 

Receptivity, danger of persistency in, 
116. 

Regeneration, the part of education 
in, III, III n. 

Regimentation, should not be required 
of little children, 386, 387, 3S8. 

Reich, Emil, his Success in Life, quoted, 
464. 

Religion, not synonymous with the 
Church, 35 n.; our failure in, 75, 75 n., 
76, 255, 258; expansion of, through 
disintegration of the Church, 255 ; 
moral laws of, 290-293 ; relation of 
the Church to, 290-293 ; forms of, in 
the United States, 291 ; essential 
agreement between science and, 321 ; 
its relation to philosophy, 420 ; persist- 
ence of, in the future, 463. See also 
Church. 

Repetition, value of, in education, 145 n. 

Reproduction, general misconception of 
functions of, among mammals, 76 n. 

Rights, of the individual, 283-285 ; 
progress of society depends upon re- 
duction of, 285. 

Robertson, Frederick William, his Ser- 
mons, quoted, 70. 

Roman Catholic Church, doubtful wis- 
dom of its attitude toward the clergy, 
33 ; educational system of, 126, 127, 
129 ; influence of, in politics, 255, 256. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, his thesis as to 
a man's first duty, 36 n. 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 19. 

Rulers, morals of, 119, 120. 

Ruskin, John, his Munera Pulveris, 
quoted, 180 ; his Sesame and Lilies, 
quoted, 215 n. ; his Crown of Wild 
Olive, quoted, 383 ; his Modern Paint- 
ers, quoted, 415 ; his Seven Lamps of 
Architecture, quoted, 433 ; his Unto 
this Last, quoted, 497. 

Russia, a cause of revolution in, 10 ; 
present general conditions in, 228 n. 

Rustics. See Barbarians. 

St. Louis, election of board of education 
in, 135 n. 

Salaries, of educators and teachers, 134, 
170, 171, 174, 191, 192, 297, 298, 440, 
441. 

San Francisco earthquake, 478, 479. 

Savage, Minot J., his My Birth, quoted, 
III n. 

Savages, of the city, 456. 

Scholarship, something more than mere 
liceracy, 228, 229 ; mission of Ameri- 
can, 371. 

School, the, aims of, primarily personal, 



35; result of its alliance with the 
State, 43, 44, 44 n.; its subordination 
to the State, 103, 130, 131, 1S5, 
186; comparative cost of , 107,436,437; 
its relation to the university, 116; its 
dependence on other institutions, 119; 
its subordination to Property, 125 ; to 
the Family, 125, 126; to the Church, 
126-128 ; symptoms of subordination 
of: its board of education, 131-133 ; 
its finances, 134; symptoms of change 
in this relation, 134, 135 ; desiderata 
of the ideal, 137; inventions of, 165 ; 
purpose of the arts of, 165-167 ; of 
the future, 175-179; differentiation 
of, from the State, in New Jersey, 
iSi, 182 ; legislation for, 182, 183 : ad- 
ministration of, 183-192 ; the school 
system in cities, 188, 189; in states 
and counties, 188; tendency toward 
state rather than municipal control of, 
189 ; advantages of state control of, 
189; advantages of local autonomy 
to, 189, 190; national control of, ad- 
vocated, 190, 191 ; supervision of, 192 ; 
industrial training provided by, 253, 
254 ; possible future functions of, 
254 ; unable to prepare for eco- 
nomic efficiency, 269, 270 ; opposition 
of, to secret societies, 272 ; ignores the 
drama, 272, 273, moral laws of, 296- 
298 ; results of its failure to prepare 
for domestic life, 296, 297 ; must be 
controlled by educators, 298 ; conser- 
vatism of, 379-382, adequate support 
for, 438-441 ; increasing demands 
upon, 440 ; an institution continuing 
through life, 490 ; considered as an 
independent social institution, 492, 
493> 497- See also Education. 

School century, 254 n. 

Schoolhouses, cost of building and 
equipping, 191, 192. 

Schools, for education, dedicated to lei- 
sure, 115; for training, 115, 135 ; need 
of new name for training, 116 ; train- 
ing, in the university, 117 ; endowed 
and private, 125, 126; church, 126- 
128, 128 n. ; constitution and power of 
boards of education in American pub- 
lic, 131 ; parochial, freedom of, from 
state control, 183 ; proposed interfer- 
ences with, 183, 184 ; national appro- 
priations for normal, 190 n.; mischief 
done in grammar and high, 216 ; col- 
lege-trained teachers in grammar, 
216 n. ; scientific and technical, 267; 
need for more special, 490. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 57, 144 n., 
208 n. 

Science, its mediation between spirit 
and mechanism, 113; its relation 
to art, 141,412, 413 ; subjects belong- 



532 



INDEX 



ing to, 164 ; its relation to literacy, 
317; to philosophy, 318, 325 ; to ob- 
servation, 318; its method of proce- 
dure, 318, 325 ; its essential agreement 
with religion, 321 ; vastness of the 
field of, 329, 330 ; entrenching of one, 
upon another, 331, 332; the duty of 
society toward, 335, 336 ; training for 
women in, 336 ; a mental quality or 
method, 385, 386 ; the harvest of intel- 
ligence, 392, 424 ; as such, not suited 
to children, 409,410 ; materials of, be- 
long to the child, 410, 411 ; motive for 
study of, 412 ; classilication of, 413 ; 
higher values of, 416 ; limitations of, 
417,418. 
Scientific method, fields invaded by,3i7. 

Secret societies, in China and America, 
271; opposition to, in American 
schools, 272. 

Seelye, Julius H., 160 n. 

Self-abnegation, inculcated by the 
Church, 39, 40. 

Self -alienation, 168, 169; marriage and 
parentage enforce, 170. 

Self-consciousness, 158, 158 n. 

Self-control, the apotheosis of will, 392. 

Self-direction, 158, 161. 

Self-made men, 15, 168. 

Self-realization, the characteristic mo- 
tive of Property, 36, 40. 

Self-sacrifice, the characteristic motive 
of the Family, 38. 

Self-surrender, the rewards of, 41. 

Seminary, meaning of the word, 116. 

Sense, knowledge of, the second stage 
in psychical development, 159; 
temptations of, 159, 160. 

Senses, the, all knowledge derived from, 
203, 203 n. ; popular ignorance con- 
cerning, 204, 205 ; the multitude of, 
205, 205 n. ; training of, the basis of 
intelligence, 206, 207, 208. 

Servants, morals of, 119, 120. 

Sex, educability unaffected by, 62 ; 
problems of, 206 n. ; single moral 
standard demanded in matters of, 289. 

Shakespeare, 72, 415; his Romeo and 
Juliet, quoted, 400 n, ; his Henry V., 
quoted, 472 n. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Ti ; his Adonais, 
quoted, 6 n. ; his Sensitive Plant, 
quoted, 473 n. 

Sin, its relation to crime, 150; com- 
mitted only by the imperfectly edu- 
cated, 150, 151 ; absurd evaluations 
and punishments of, 152; nature of 



great sms, 



= 53) 153 "•; most 



dreadful forms of, 160, 161, 
Skill, Plato's distinction beween art 

and, 136 n. 
Slander. See Calumny. 



Slavery, Lincoln's course in regard to, 
224. 

Sleep, a moral duty, 280, 281. 

Social control, 158, 161. 

Social evil, 2S9. • 

Social institutions, the eight great, 31 ; 
largeness of life dependent upon 
identification with, 31, 34; four of 
these, primarily personal, 34 ; servants 
attaching to these, 34, 35 ; profes- 
sions attaching to the others, 35 ; 
dependent upon Business or Property 
for revenue, 42 ; habits of, 376, 376 n., 
■^,^^^ 380 ; incompleteness of, 377 n. ; 
duty of the educated man to, 472, 473. 

Socialism, State, 44. 

Society, the individual paramount to, 7 ; 
its endeavor to protect the child, 9 ; 
contact with, a necessary part of 
education, 17-20, 84 n., 85 ; new in- 
stitutions developed by, 84 ; motives 
of, in organizing education, 97, 98 ; 
its duty to the individual, 283, 284, 
289, 494 ; moral laws of, 312 ; its re- 
lation to the educator, 433. 

Sociology, importance of, in the science 
of education, 142. 

Socrates, 16, 27, 58 n., 'ji^ 141, 162, 352, 
353 ; his failure to comprehend the 
world-spirit, 161 ; as interpreted by 
Plato, 346. 

Solitude, a necessary factor in educa- 
tion, 17-20. 

Solomon, 72. 

Sophocles, 72. 

Soul, education of the, 5, 6, 6n., 8, 9; 
sins of the, 160, 161. 

Spanish-American War, how it might 
have been averted, 49 n. 

Specialization, of social functions, 
tendency toward, 44. 

Speech, a sentence is a, 237 ; parts of, 
238. 

Spellmg, function of, 233 ; amoral duty, 
392. 

Spencer, Herbert, failure of his philo- 
sophy as a science of sciences, 329 ; 
his definition of desire, 336 n.; his 
First Principles of Synthetic Philoso- 
phy, quoted, 433; his conviction re- 
garding universal decay, 454 n., 455 n. 

Spenser, Edmund, his Hymn in Honor 
of Beauty, quoted, 359. 

Spirit. See Soul. 

Starvation, unknown among savages. 

State, the, its usurpation of functions, 
35, 36, 36 n., 42, 44, 48; personal 
legislation by, vicious, 35 ; not syn- 
onymous with Government, 35 n.; its 
double function, 41, 42 ; its conspicu- 
ous weaknesses, 42 ; its sources of 
revenue, 42, 43; its struggle with 



INDEX 



533 



Business for control of society, 43 ; 
result of its alliance with the School, 
43, 44, 44 n. ; its subordination to 
other institutions, 44, 45,45 n.; dictates 
of Property and the Church to, 45 n. ; 
the School controlled by, 103, 130- 
134, 185, 186 ; character of the modern 
American, 130, 131; differentiation 
of the School from, in New Jersey, 
181, 182; the paramount social in- 
stitution, 293, 295; Burke's theory re- 
garding, 293, 294 ; moral laws of, 294, 
295 ; its regulation of wages, 303. 

Stephen, Sir Leslie, his History of Eng- 
lish Thought in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, quoted, 376 n., 464 n., 482 n. 

Sterling, John, 402 n. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 444 n. 

Stirner, Max, his The Ego and His Own, 
quoted, 218 n. 

Stoicism, 352. 

Story, William Wetmore, his lo Victis, 
105 n. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 23- 

Studies and exercises, evaluation of, 
383-385,386,393; four questions re- 
garding, in pedagogy, 423 ; constants 
in, 424-428 ; elective, 428, 429 ; group- 
ing of, under humanities, sciences, 
and arts, 429 ; true order of, 429 ; 
proper age for particular, 429. 

Success, a matter of standards and defi- 
nitions, 70 ; not always a matter of 
general accomplishment, 71 ; compat- 
ible with personal immorality, 72, 
73 ; not always a matter of contem- 
porary recognition, 72 ; seldom evi- 
denced by property, 73 ; fame no proof 
of, 73 ; tests of, 74, 75, 78, 79 ; de- 
pendent upon goodness, 79 ; of edu- 
cated men, 104, 104 n., 470. 

Suffrage, denied to women, 258 ; argu- 
ment for equal, 262, 262 n. 

Superintendent of schools, legislation 
regarding, 183; functions of, 187, 
188 ; disadvantages of many county, 
198; relation of, to boards of educa- 
tion, 198, 199. See also Educators. 

Superstitions, 319, 320. 

Supervision, school, necessity for, 193, 
194 ; dangers from incompetent, 195 ; 
disadvantages of elaborate system of, 
iq8. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, his Songs 
before Sunrise, quoted, 313, 399. 

Sympathy, development of social, 478, 
479- 

Talent, native and educated, 92, 92 n. ; 
popular notion concerning, 105 ; recog- 
nizable early in life, ^84. 

Talents, parable of the, 80 n. 

Tarda, George, classification of mental 



phenomena by, in his Social Laws, 
by n. 

Tariff, protective, a bribe to business, 
43 n-» 45 n. 

Taxes, confiscatory nature of, 43 n. 

Taxpayers, rights of, against teachers, 
436 ; attitude of, toward school appro- 
priations, 438. 

Taylor, Jeremy, on the ills of life, 347 ; 
his Holy Living, quoted, 469 n. 

Teachers, reasons for growing require- 
ments of, 10 ; number of, in America, 
108 ; use of the term, 118 ; effect of 
boards of education on, 132 ; salaries 
of, 134, 170, 171, 174,191, 192, 297, 
298, 441 ; education of the typical, 
169 ; their misdirected efforts, 169, 
170; celibacy prescribed for women, 
170, 183; objections to married women 
as, 171-173; natural, 194; function 
of, 195, 196; dangers of incompetent, 
195-197 ; college trained, in grammar 
schools, 216 n. ; training of, 216 ; need 
of efficiency in, 222 ; government by, 
263, 264 ; persistence of men of aver- 
age ability among, 381 ; obligations 
of, to the child, 433, 434 ; to the mo- 
ther of the child, 434, 435 ; to the 
taxpayer, 436 ; to their own teachers, 
437; to the social institutions, 437; 
need of increased number of, 441. 

Teaching, its relation to education, 52. 

Temperature-appetite, 445. 

Temple, nature of, in ancient Egypt, 
116, 117. 

Tennyson, Alfred, quotationfrom,458n., 
472 ; his Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
after, quoted, 17 ; his In Memoriam, 
quoted, 51, 109 ; his Princess, quoted, 
213. 

Testimony, "hearsay," rejected in 
English and American courts of law, 
240. 

Text-books, editing of, 167 ; factor in 
conservatism of the School, 380. 

Theatre, fascination of, for the young, 
273, 273 n. See also Drama. 

Therapeutics, new system of, 206 n. 

Thirlwall, Connop, his Remains, quoted, 
64. 

Thwing, Charles F., his History of 
Higher Education in America, 
quoted, it6 n., 371. 

Titchener, Edward B., his Experimental 
Psychology, quoted, 138. 

Toleration, religious, in America, 45 n. 

Tolstoi, quotation from, 37. 

Trades. See Occupations. 

Tradition, education has followed the 
lines of, 168. 

Transportation of goods, 309. 

Trust-estates, victims of, 250, 251. 

Truth, the price of freedom, 23, 24 ; 



534 



INDEX 



a matter of the intellect, 28, 29 ; 
new, comes through individuals, 57, 
58, 83; the goal of education, 121, 
122, 124 ; encouragement of, in the 
child, 207 ; business of culture and 
education regarding, 226 ; science a 
search for, 318-321; history of the 
publication of new, 380 ; advantages 
of controversy concerning new, 380. 

Tsi An, Empress of China, 243. 

Tufts, James Hayden, quotation from, 
483 n. 

United States, individualization in, 
266 ; economic efficiency in, 267 ; 
early appearance of this efficiency in, 
268, 269 ; no general preparation for 
military service in schools of, 270, 
271. 

Universities, advocacy of national, 190. 

University, academic freedom in the 
endowed and in the state, 43 n. ; pur- 
pose of, 116, ii6n., 117; imperfect 
control of, by culture, 128, 129. See 
also College. 

Values, false perspective regarding 

ethical, 72 n. 
Variability, progress through, 24, 66 ; 

typical instances of, 99, 100. 
Variants, from the masses, 91, 92, 93, 

127, 135- 
Viciousness, evidence of incomplete 

education, 175, 176. 
Victoria, Queen of England, 33. 
Village, the place for habitation, 462, 

463- 
Virgil, 73. 
Vital statistics, prosperity and, 478, 

478 n. 
Vitality, psychical, and physical energy, 

444. 
Volapiik, 233 n. 
Voltaire, 72. 
Vries, Hugo de, 354. 

Wages, right of the State to regulate, 

303- 

War, defensive and offensive, 41, 42, 
49 n.; morality gaining upon, 48; 
evidences that it will cease, 49 ; ad- 
missible precautions against, 49 n.; 
no war righteous upon both sides, 
49 n. ; evil features and influences of, 
49-51 ; some good results of, 51 ; pre- 
paration and training for, 270, 271. 

Ward, Lester Frank, his Psychic Fac- 
tors of Civilization, quoted, i52n., 
i8on., 334n., 453 n. ; his Applied So- 
ciology, quoted, 423. 



Washington, George, 71, 161, 444 n. 

Wealth, not synonymous with property, 
35) 35 "• ; product not of labor but of 
power, 155 ; decrease of, a menace to 
civilization, 227, 228. 

Weber, Alfred, his History of Philo- 
sophy, quoted, 355. 

Webster, Daniel, 62, 71 ; his Speech at 
Plymouth (1820), quoted, 42 n. ; quo- 
tation from his second Bunker Hill 
oration, 373. 

Weininger, Otto, neighbor-philosophy 
reviled by, 208 n. 

White, Andrew Dickson, his Autobio- 
graphy, quoted, 129 n. 

Whitman, Walt, 72; his Brooklyn 
Ferry, quoted, 102 ; his Song of My- 
self, quoted, 322 ; his Leaves of Grass, 
quoted, 474 n. 

Wife-beating, 285. 

Will, manifestations of the, 146 ; sig- 
nificance of weakness of, 219; de- 
velopment and strengthening of, 389 ; 
a mode of mind, 495. 

William, Emperor of Germany, 250 n. 

William the Conqueror, 249. 

Wisdom, relative to tasks and opportu- 
nities, 384 ; the apotheosis of intel- 
lect, 392 ; method of procedure from 
ignorance to, 484. 

Woman, position of, in historical civili- 
zation, 31 ; progress of, advantageous 
to humanity, 32, 33; vulgar philo- 
sophy regarding, 23 ; modern legis- 
lation in behalf of, 38 n. ; employment 
of, in the public schools, 134, 174; 
celibacy imposed upon, as teachers, 
170, 183; without political influence 
in America, 258 ; result of their dis- 
franchisement, 260, 261 ; no training 
for citizenship given to, 261 ; argu- 
ment for suffrage for, 262, 262 n. ; 
American, less efficient than man, 
266 ; difficulties in the way of scien- 
tific or artistic training for, 336 ; 
effect of conservatism of, upon the 
School, 380 ; economic freedom of, 

483- 

Words, choice of, 400 ; fitness of, 
401. 

Wordsworth, William, his Poems writ- 
ten in Youth, quoted, 17; his Mis- 
cellaneous Sonnets, quoted, 18 ; his 
Ode to Duty, quoted, 59 n.; his Inti- 
mations of Immortality, quoted, 80 ; 
his Tintern Abbey, quoted, 321, 322. 

Working class, who should constitute, 

304- 
World-spirit, comprehension of, 161 ; 
Christ's understanding of, 162. 



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